A Woman's Place

by Barbara Delinsky

  “Mommeeee! I knew you’d be here when we got home.” She squeezed my neck hard enough to pinch nerves, but I didn’t care one bit. When Johnny followed her in, I opened an arm and hugged him, too.

  “Hi, Mom.” The voice was pushed deep, no doubt to compensate for the way he hugged me back. “When’d ya land?”

  “A little while ago,” I said. It was only a little white lie. I wasn’t ready to tell them what I had to yet, wanted to enjoy them a bit, and it was easy, so easy, like this was just another excited homecoming.

  I held them both back, Kikit with her bottom on the counter and her legs around me, Johnny still within the circle of my arm. “You guys look great.” I focused on Kikit. She was the image of health. “Feeling okay?”

  “Yup.”

  “Eating okay?”

  “Yup.” She opened her mouth wide. “Ook ahhee I ost a oot.”

  “Another tooth?” I admired the spot her tongue was touching. “My goodness, that’s a beautiful hole. I take it you do have the tooth?” She would have been in tears otherwise. That was what had happened the last time.

  But she was bobbing her head up and down, digging into her pocket, and producing a tiny enamel nugget from a fistful of lint, then telling me everything that she planned to write the tooth fairy in her letter, which had been the solution last time and had so pleased her—how else can the tooth fairy know how special I am—that she had vowed to do it even when she did have the tooth. She was still talking about her letter when Johnny said, “Mikey Rubin broke his arm in the playground today.”

  “I’m not done,” Kikit cried, taking my chin and guiding it back.

  “This is more important. It was so gross, Mom.”

  “Mommy, he’s interrupting.”

  “This is important. There was a bone sticking out from the skin and blood all over. They took him away in an ambulance.”

  “He was crying,” Kikit reported with sudden authority, taking over Johnny’s conversation when she couldn’t sustain her own. “We could hear it all the way in second grade, but I didn’t cry when my tooth came out.” She crinkled up her nose and gave a sniff. Her eyes lit up. “Somethin’s in the oven,” she sang.

  “Chocolate chocolate chip,” Johnny said to her, then to me, “Mikey wasn’t even doing much when it happened. We were playing bombardment against the wall, and he was trying to get away from the ball when he tripped and did this kind of jump and turn and then—wham—there was this awful scream. I mean, the bone was right there, coming out of the skin—”

  I muzzled him by dragging him close and said against a thicket of raven-dark hair, “Say that one more time and I’ll be sick in the sink. You’re making me feel woozy.”

  “Yeah, I kind of felt like that when I was looking at it,” he said when I let him up for air.

  “I’ll bet lots of your friends did. It’s a pretty normal way to feel.”

  “I want a cookie, Mommy,” Kikit said. “Are they almost done?”

  Two more minutes, and they were, then another two to cool. While we waited, Kikit told me about the turkey that had visited her classroom, the Barbie doll that she had decided she wanted for Christmas, and the note that her teacher had sent home—she had dropped it on the playground, she thought, or maybe on the bus—that said something about white bugs in some kid’s hair.

  Lice. Swell. I did a quick check, saw nothing, but vowed to tell Dennis to look. See how he liked that.

  Johnny wasn’t as chatty as Kikit. He didn’t hold my hand, or touch my hair or my face, as she did, but he stayed close to my side until I gave the word, then wielded the spatula himself. We were incorrigible—always rushing this part, peeling off the first of the cookies when they were too hot to hold their shape so that they curled around our fingers instead, but we laughed. We licked melted chocolate from our fingers. We drank milk in a way that left the kind of mustache we saw in the ads, bubbly white smears over toothy grins.

  Then Kikit said to the doorway, “Hurry up, Daddy. They’re nearly gone.”

  I wanted to chase him away, wanted to cherish these final moments of innocence. It felt so good, so safe, so normal to laugh over cookies and milk.

  But the look he gave me was sobering, expectant, in a sharp-focused way.

  Johnny jumped up from the table and retrieved his backpack from the mudroom. He was passing back through the kitchen en route to the hall when he asked, “What’s for supper?”

  I wasn’t making supper. I was supposed to pack up my things, visit with the children, and leave by four. If I didn’t, Dennis would have the cops usher me out. In front of the children.

  Unless he realized how much the kids had missed me and was having second thoughts. Unless he was wondering if there wasn’t a better way to do this. Unless he was thinking that he didn’t know what in the hell was for dinner and that it would be easier to simply let me stay a while.

  Answering Johnny, I said, “You’ll have to ask your dad what’s for supper.”

  Johnny was frowning at me from the door. “You always make something special when you’ve been gone. I want lasagna.”

  “Fried chicken,” Kikit chirped. She was doing a little hip-hop, with her elbows on the table and her knees on the chair.

  “We had fried chicken last time Mom came home. It’s my turn. Lasagna.”

  “How about pizza,” Dennis said.

  Kikit crinkled her nose, in distaste this time. “We had that last night with Grandma and Grandpa. Besides, Mommy’s making supper.”

  “No,” Dennis said. “She’s not.”

  It was a minute before that registered. Kikit stopped dancing. Her eyes grew round. She looked from Dennis to me and back, then sucked in a breath and her elbows, and said with hushed excitement, “Are we celebrating something?”

  I waited for Dennis to answer her, but all he did, the yellow-bellied coward, was to hitch his chin my way. The children’s eyes followed.

  I let out a breath. “No celebration. Just talk. Come sit, Johnny.”

  He didn’t move. “Is it Grandma?”

  I gave him a sad smile—such a sweet, sober, intuitive child—and shook my head. “Not Grandma. Us.” There wasn’t an easy way to say it. I had tested dozens of words in the time between last Thursday and now. No combination was good. Simpler seemed better. “Your dad and I are separating.”

  “What does that mean?” Kikit asked.

  I gave Dennis a look that asked him to explain, but he stood with his hands on his hips and seemed as curious to hear what I was going to say as Kikit. Apparently he wasn’t there to help. He was supervising. He didn’t want to do the dirty work himself, but he wanted it done his way. He must have felt that the court had given him that right.

  Well, it hadn’t. If I wanted to tell the children that their father was an insecure SOB who was lacking in loyalty, compassion, and common sense, I would. Neither the court nor Dennis dictated my words. Love did. Worry did. Self-respect did.

  “Separating means that we’ll be living apart from each other,” I said.

  Kikit took that in stride. “In separate houses?”

  “Yes.”

  “But you can’t,” she stated. “You’re our parents. You have to be with us.”

  “We will be. Just in different places.”

  “But I can’t be two places at once.”

  “You won’t. You’ll be with Daddy some of the time and me the rest.”

  “Isn’t that what we do already?”

  Well, it was. She was absolutely right. But only to a point. “What we’ve been doing is having overlapping lives. Sometimes all four of us are here, other times just three. From now on it’ll be three—either you and Johnny and me, or you and Johnny and Daddy. Daddy and I won’t be here with you guys at the same time.”

  “Why not?” she demanded.

  I turned to Dennis again, hoping he would take a stab at that one, but he was looking blank—no help in the answer department. Not that I blamed him this time. Saying the right thing w
as crucial. The wrong words could cause permanent damage.

  Only I didn’t know the right words. So I fell back on the age-old, “Because we think it’s best.”

  “Well, I don’t,” Kikit insisted. “Who’ll live where, and where’ll we live?”

  “You’ll live here. I’ll have another place.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t know yet. But you can be with me there or be with me here.”

  “I want you here all the time. Why can’t you live in the den upstairs? I’ll clear all my babies out. You like the sofa bed, you told me you did.”

  It was Johnny, plastered to the wall just inside the kitchen, who said, “They don’t want to live in the same house with each other. They don’t like each other anymore.”

  I left the table and went to him. His body was stiff, his eyes sunken. It was like he was trying his best not to collapse inward but was losing the battle. I slipped my arm around his shoulders, no easy feat given that outer rigidity, and said, “There’s more to it than that. I’m not sure even I understand it myself. It’s pretty complicated.”

  “Tell me. I wanna know!” Kikit cried, but I continued talking to Johnny, jiggling his shoulders in an attempt to loosen him up.

  “The one thing you have to remember—the only really important thing—is that we both love you and Kikit.”

  “But you don’t love each other,” he said.

  Four days before, I would have argued. Now? “I don’t know. This is kind of a trial period. We’ll be doing lots of thinking and talking.” I didn’t want to mention Dean Jenovitz or, worse, the court order against me. In time, the children would know about Jenovitz, since he had to meet with them. I hoped they would never have to know about the court order.

  “You won’t really notice much of a change,” I said, trying to be comfortable and upbeat for me as much as for them. I was feeling hollowed out. “Things’ll be pretty much the same as they’ve always been.”

  He didn’t believe me for a minute. I could see it in his eyes. But he didn’t say a word.

  “Are you gonna cook, Daddy?” Kikit asked.

  “Sometimes.”

  “And bake cookies with us?”

  “I may leave that to your mother.”

  “What about my medicine?”

  “What about it?” he asked.

  “Who’ll make sure it’s here?”

  “I will.”

  Her little face crumpled then. Tears welled and spilled. She rocked on her knees, back and forth, and raised a fist to her eye. “I didn’t mean to get thick I didn’t mean to really I didn’t.”

  “Oh God,” I whispered and dragged Johnny with me to the table so that I could hold Kikit, too. “You didn’t do anything, baby. Shhh. This isn’t your fault.”

  “I got thick—sick—and didn’t have my medicine—so he got mad at you—”

  “No, baby, no, it wasn’t that, don’t ever think it was that.” I had picked up on her rocking, and while Johnny wasn’t exactly rocking with us, he wasn’t fighting my hold. “This thing between Daddy and me is just between Daddy and me. It’s been building for a long time, maybe even longer than you’ve been alive. We aren’t working well together, Daddy and I. We aren’t making each other happy. You guys make us happy. But we should be doing more for each other, me and Daddy, and we’re not.”

  “I want you to live here,” Kikit said. Her voice was muffled against my breast, her face warm and wet and nuzzling.

  “I can’t do that now. But you’ll see, I’ll find someplace to live that you’ll just love.”

  “In Santa Fe?” asked my son, clearly grappling with the puzzle, trying to get the pieces to fit.

  “No, sweetie, not in Santa Fe, that’s much too far away. I was thinking about something five, maybe ten minutes from here. How does that sound?” It sounded good to me. “And I won’t even be traveling so much. Wait’ll you see, I’ll be with you more than I was before.” Especially once we appealed Selwey’s decision and got the court order reversed.

  “What about Thanksgiving?” he asked.

  “Hmm. I haven’t given that much thought.” It came out sounding like we were off on a new adventure, which wasn’t all that bad. The children could relate to adventures. “We could go to Cleveland to be with Grandma. Or—what do you think we should do?”

  “Have it here like we always do.”

  “We could do two,” Kikit said, hopeful eyes rising from the chenille of my sweater.

  “We could,” I conceded. Not that I would be at two. There would be Dennis and his parents and the children at one, and me and the children and Brody and Jill and all the family-less friends I usually invited to ours, at the other. Of course, I had no idea where ours would be, or how it would feel to be in a strange place without Dennis, without my mother. And when I thought of having to tell all those friends I would invite that we were separated, I felt a major ache.

  The court session had been real. Telling Kikit and Johnny was real. Now friends? And Connie—how am I going to tell Connie?

  Thanksgiving. Christmas. Johnny’s birthday, then Kikit’s. They were all family occasions, but it struck me—shook me to think—that they would no longer be the same.

  “Mommy,” Kikit whined, her head free of my sweater now, “tomorrow is look-see at ballet. Will you bring cupcakes for afterward?”

  Tomorrow was Tuesday. Not Wednesday, like the judge had said. If Dennis was willing, we could change days for this week, and the judge wouldn’t be any the wiser.

  But Kikit wasn’t done. She was hanging on me now. “And Wednesday is parents’ day at the library. I told Lily we would take her, ’cause her mom has to work.”

  So much for switching days. But I could do both.

  No, I couldn’t. Dennis told me that in the next instant with the subtlest shake of his head. It was accompanied by the kind of look that warned what would happen if I argued, the same kind of thing that would happen if I wasn’t gone by four.

  No, I didn’t want him calling Jack Mulroy. No, I didn’t want to be charged with contempt of court. What I wanted was a reversal of the ruling against me. Carmen was working on that. The best I could do to help was to be a model of obedience.

  It was now three-thirty-five.

  “I’ll do Wednesday at the library,” I said. “Daddy will do look-see at ballet tomorrow.”

  “But I want you to. The mother sets it all up, you know, on the table in the back room?”

  “Tell you what. I’ll buy the cupcakes and Daddy can bring them.”

  “It’s not the same,” she cried, then went all round-eyed. “And Thursday, what about Thursday? Thursday’s Halloween. You’ll be here for Halloween, won’t you? You always take me out, I don’t want to go out alone.”

  “Johnny’s going alone this year,” Dennis said. “He’ll take you with him.”

  “Da-ad,” Johnny protested, and I agreed. Kikit had to be watched every minute to make sure she didn’t pop something into her mouth that would make her sick. It was unfair to ask Johnny to do that.

  “I don’t want to go with Johnny,” Kikit declared. “I want Mommy.”

  “I’ll take you,” Dennis said.

  That gave her pause. There was a tentative, “You will?” Then, still tentative, “So Mommy’ll stay home and give out candy?”

  “Either Mommy or Grandma.”

  “I want Mommy to. You’ll do it, Mommy, won’t you?”

  Of course, I would. I always loved Halloween, bought candy weeks in advance, made special costumes. This year’s were done—Kikit’s a mouse, Johnny’s a pirate. Of course, I would be part of the ritual.

  “She may not be able to,” Dennis said.

  Kikit turned on him. “Why not?”

  He hitched his chin my way. Kikit looked up at me. I was trying to decide whether to argue with Dennis, or to tell the children the truth or lie, when she pulled back. “Is it because you don’t want to live here anymore?”

  “I do—”

 
; “You don’t love us anymore,” she wailed.

  When I reached for her, she skittered away. Her mouth was turned down, her chin quivering. Releasing Johnny, I came out of my seat, caught her, and pulled her into my arms. I held her there, tightly, tightly, even when she squirmed to escape.

  It was a minute before I cleared the emotion that clogged my throat. Then my voice was hoarse, fierce as I bent over the top of her head. “I love you dearly. Never, never think that I don’t. You and your brother mean more to me than anything else in the world.”

  “So why can’t you be here?” came the high-pitched wail from my middle.

  “Because the judge says I can’t. He says you’ll be with Daddy for most of the week and with me for Wednesdays and Saturdays, just until we get all this worked out.”

  “But why?”

  “I don’t know, baby,” I crooned against the warmth of her hair, “I don’t know, but that’s what he said, so that’s what we have to do.”

  It was nearing three-forty-five. Time was running out.

  “But I’ll miss you.”

  “Bah,” I teased. “You’ll be too busy to miss me, and whenever you do, you’ll call me. You’ll call me whenever you want, night or day, both of you.” I looked around to include Johnny, only he wasn’t there.

  My eyes flew to Dennis. He shot a thumb toward the hall. Furious that he had just let the child go, I scooped Kikit up and deposited her in her father’s arms. “Hold tight, baby,” I told her in a tone far gentler than the look I gave Dennis.

  Johnny was in his room, sitting with his back to the headboard of the bed. The way he stared at me as I crossed to him nearly broke my heart. I sat and took his hand. He took it back and made a fist against the comforter. I had to settle for holding his wrist.

  “This isn’t what I want, Johnny. If I had my druthers, things would be different. But I don’t have my druthers. Things are out of my hands.”

  “Moms stay with kids.”

  “Usually. Not always. Especially now that so many mothers work.”

  “So it’s easier for you to let Dad stay here? So you can work?”

  “No. You kids come before my work. You always have. Dad is staying because the judge said so.”