Acts of Contrition

by Handford, Jennifer

  Hand-me-down shoes, sharing a bedroom, and stretching one pound of ground beef into a meal for six made up our roots, dug us deeper into our family soil, braided our branches around one another. None of us ever complained about hardship because it never seemed that way to us. Dad brought home a modest government salary, Mom stayed home and cared for us, and we had everything we needed. We were public school kids who walked home together, played outside until dark, and ate dinner around the same table every night. Summers were spent at the community pool, vacations were trips to visit relatives. Nothing fancy, but there was a lot of fun, a lot of laughter.

  Growing up, everyone in our neighborhood was in the same boat: trying to make ends meet while juggling kids and a mortgage. Birthday parties were simple: backyard games and a homemade cake. When I was older, I was allowed to have a friend spend the night. These days my kids are invited to birthday parties at gyms and bounce houses and bowling alleys and petting zoos. It’s an excess that’s easy to fall into. We all want to give our children so much. But then I think of my birthday parties, the flour-sack races, pin the tail on the donkey, Mom’s beaming pride as she’d round the corner with candles flickering on her birthday cake masterpiece, and I think, What can be better than that? There was a deep richness in the simplicity of it all.

  Once when I was in high school, I asked my mom, “We’re middle class, right?”

  She scrunched her face and considered the question. “Lower middle class, I’d say,” she said. “If you’re talking in terms of economics.” She knew I was—my free enterprise book was sprawled across the counter. “But you can’t label what we have. Not truly what we have,” Mom said.

  The house I share with Tom and the kids is a step up in terms of space and style from my parents’ house, but still, there’s something primal about driving up to the house I called home, a gravitational pull that summons me when I get within a half-mile radius of 29 Terrace Circle. I never tire of approaching the three steps that lead me home. My shoulders always drop a half inch as I step through the front door and inhale the smells that accompany my history. If my world exploded tomorrow, if I were in need of refuge, at least I would have this home.

  My four kids barrel into the house as if it’s their own, yelling hellos to Nana and Pop. My mom has carved out special nooks and crannies for each of them, places they know they’re allowed to go, things they’re allowed to touch. Sally loves to flip through the photo albums, as if secrets are hidden in each one, and it’s her job to see beyond the obvious. She especially loves the pictures of me and my sisters when we were young. She has just finished reading Little Women, and she is certain I was the Jo in the bunch. I’m honored that she regards me that way—brave and principled—but I definitely wasn’t the Jo; that would have been Martina or Teresa. Sally would be disheartened to know how unsure of myself I am most of the time.

  Emily has been granted access to my mother’s hatbox, which overflows with costume jewelry. In no time, my daughter is swimming in heavy strands of pearls and dangly clip-ons. The fact that my mother has a hatbox teeming with jewelry kills me. My no-nonsense mother wears the same three pieces of jewelry every day: a tight pearl ball in each ear, her wedding ring, which has nearly burrowed under her skin, and a thin gold crucifix around her neck. So where’d she get all of the costume jewelry? She picks it up here and there, flea markets and garage sales, just for Emily. Mom doesn’t part easily with a dime, so it touches me every time I see that the hatbox has a new addition. It tickles me that Emily’s nana is so different from the mother who made me beg for three years before getting my ears pierced.

  The twins head to the coat closet, where they sit under the drape of garments, playing with the Old MacDonald’s Farm and Lincoln Logs from my childhood. The toys are in mint condition. The four of us girls veered more toward Barbies than building cabins. Another non-Jo fact about me that Sally would be disappointed to learn.

  Once inside the front door, there’s no room for indecision. Two steps up brings me to the dining room and kitchen, where I’ll find my mom. Two steps down brings me to the dark-paneled den, where I can reliably find my father. I choose to go up to the kitchen first to see my mother, who is standing guard over the stove like a sentry, a Diet Pepsi in one hand, a cigarette in the other. When she sees we’re here, she smashes her cigarette into the tray and flicks on the little air purifier that sits on the table. With the cigarette extinguished, the kitchen now fills with the aroma of sauce.

  “Hi, Ma,” I say, kissing her cheek. She smells of rosemary and Virginia Slims, and though it baffles me that she and my father still smoke in this day and age, I love it because it’s always been her. She swears that she’s cutting down, only two cigarettes at night, one in the morning. The State Farm office where she has been office manager for twenty-five years has gone “smoke free,” so she’s given up daytime smoking completely.

  “How’s my girl?” she says. Mom wears black slacks, the pleated polyester kind that have the elastic waist around the back. On top she wears a blouse—polyester, too. Mom runs the risk of being highly flammable. Once she gets home from work she covers up in an apron, which she’ll wear until dinner is finished and the dishes are done. Her hair falls in long brown waves, and for as long as I can remember she has twisted the length of it into a bun at the base of her neck. A few rogue curls spiral around her face, springing in every direction. Though my sisters and I cringe at her ancient wardrobe and the fact that she still smokes cigarettes, Mom is Sophia Loren beautiful.

  “Sauce smells good,” I say. “How’d you make it?” I ask every time. She never tells.

  “No recipe,” Mom says. “Just a little of this, a little of that.”

  “I’m your daughter,” I say, faking heartbreak. “How could you not tell your own flesh and blood?”

  “It comes out a little different every time,” she says with a shrug. “It’s no secret.”

  The thing is, it never comes out different. It’s always exactly the same, fresh and earthy with spicy notes of oregano. When I was little, I used to eat Mom’s sauce straight out of a bowl, like soup. The only thing that changes is whether there’s hot and sweet sausage swimming through it or Mom’s meatballs. Always a fresh loaf of soft Italian bread from the bakery. Always thick pats of butter. And always the imposter of a salad: torn pieces of iceberg lettuce drenched in two parts oil, one part vinegar, heavily salted and peppered.

  Tonight we’re celebrating Emily’s ninth birthday. For the next six days, Emily gets to claim being “the same age” as Sally, until her sister turns ten on the third day of November. I see Mom’s made her famous double-layer chocolate cake. It’s decorated with sprinkles that shimmer like diamonds. Perfect for Emily, our little diva.

  Though Mom cooks every night, she’s as thin as a rail. A healthy regimen of Diet Pepsi and cigarettes will do that. Her real pleasure is from watching her family eat. She and my dad are addicted to Diet Pepsi, though they drink a pot of decaf with dinner every night. Mom sits with her coffee, a small bowl of pasta that she’ll only pick at, and watches everyone else eat. She scans our plates, passes bowls, and throws in the occasional “Are you sick? Not hungry?” for anyone who pauses or begs off seconds or thirds. Mom reserves her fondest affection for the person who eats the most and, since we all want her love, we stuff ourselves to win her prize and leave uncomfortably full every Sunday night.

  “Go say hello to your father,” Mom says, and kisses me again. I head back down the two short levels of steps. Dad’s pushed back in his recliner, each foot pointing outward, his arm behind his head. His vices are the same as Mom’s: Diet Pepsi and cigarettes, both purchased in bulk at Costco. I see that I’m not the first to get to him. Sally’s on the arm of his recliner, her arm slung around Pop, his around her. They’re sitting cheek to cheek, watching the highlights from the baseball game. Dad’s a man of few words, but he’s accessible.

  “Hey, Pop,” I say, leaning over to give him a kiss on his cheek. I slide one over to
Sally, too.

  “How’s my angel?” he asks, chucking my chin with his hand.

  “Great! Good,” I say. “What do you have Tom doing in the basement?” I can hear him rumbling around down there.

  “Just looking through some of my old tools,” Dad says. “What am I going to do with three ratchet sets?”

  Dad is always talking like he’s going to keel over and die at any moment. You’d think he’d lay off the cigarettes, sausage, and bacon. He’s always sticking Post-it Notes on miscellaneous items: For Mary. For Tom. For Teresa. Whomever. It makes him feel better knowing that his prized possessions will be in good hands.

  He stares at the television. He looks at me like he wants to say something but then doesn’t.

  “What’s up, Dad?”

  He looks at Sally, who is engrossed in the sports reel, and then arches his eyebrows over his horn-rimmed glasses and says, “Sal, honey. Why don’t you go check on your father?”

  “Okay, Pop,” Sally says, sliding out of the recliner and clomping down the stairs.

  Dad takes a breath. Rubs his eyes. “I’ve been seeing a bit of news coverage on that Landon character,” Dad says.

  “I know, I know,” I say, waving it away. “It’s been nice and quiet these last few years with him as attorney general. Not a lot of news coverage anyway.”

  “And now he wants the Senate,” Dad says.

  “Lofty goals,” I say. “But who knows, maybe he’ll make it.” I pray to God that he does make it. So long as Landon is in the public eye he’ll stay out of my life. It’s in his times of defeat when he wallows and grasps at what might have been.

  “Why not?” Dad says. “He doesn’t have a bad message.”

  “True, but a lot could happen in a year,” I say. “We’ll just have to wait and see.”

  “What’s Tommy say?”

  “He hates seeing him. Wishes he didn’t exist.”

  “Talk to him,” Dad says. “You know it’s not easy on him, seeing your ex-boyfriend, your ex-fiancé, whatever, plastered across the television.”

  “I know,” I say. “It sucks that we can’t ever get away from him completely.”

  “As long as he’s a public figure—a politician, of all things—I don’t think you ever will.”

  At dinner we stuff ourselves on spaghetti and meatballs, until we’re slouched back in our chairs with our buttons popped on our pants. Mom pours coffee and asks Sally to dim the lights and bring in the cake. We do our most dramatic, operatic, over-the-top singing of “Happy Birthday” to Emily, a girl who appreciates grand style. She claps and takes a bow and throws kisses to us all. Then we shove down more food, each of us polishing off our generous slices of Mom’s chocolate layer cake with fudge frosting. Tom asks for seconds, sealing his status as the best son-in-law ever.

  When we get home from my parents’ house, Tom and I start the nightly turndown service: While he feeds Daisy and throws her a tennis ball in the backyard, I usher the girls in and out of the shower and bathe the boys in the tub. Once the boys are in their jammies, Tom reads them a stack of books. I start another load of laundry, empty the dishwasher, and fill my hands and arms with a million small items that have somehow popped out of drawers and cupboards and trunks throughout the day.

  It’s ten thirty by the time I fall into bed against a stack of three pillows with my book in hand. Tom’s on the computer in the corner of our bedroom. When a text message issues its burbling-water sound, I look up and see that my cell phone is on the desk.

  “Toss me my phone, babe,” I say. Tom lobs it onto the bed.

  I assume it’s from my sister Angie. She and I text each other frequently. But it’s not Angie. It’s Landon James. I drop the phone instinctively as if it’s hot, look at Tom, and steady my breath. The walls pull in, the room seems smaller, the air thicker. My heart thumps in my chest. Despite Tom’s worries, Landon hasn’t contacted me in years—not since the life insurance phone call seven or eight years ago—so the fact that he’s texting me now is as alarming as an intruder in my house. I pick up the phone again. Read the message again.

  We need to talk, the message reads.

  “Who wrote?” Tom asks.

  “One of the moms from preschool,” I lie. “I forgot that I’m supposed to send in cupcakes tomorrow.” Meanwhile I type Why? and hit send.

  “You want me to run to the store?” Tom asks. “Or can you stop in the morning?”

  Can I call you? he writes.

  NO! I text.

  “Mary?” Tom asks. “The store?”

  “I’ll go,” I say, trying to rearrange my face into something that feels normal, but my skin feels tight and tingly, like I’ve been shot with Novocain. “I think one of the kids has an allergy. I’d better check the ingredients.” I’m disgusted by how easily the lies flow, like I do it all the time.

  I stare at my phone. Wait.

  Call me then, Landon writes.

  “Sound good?” Tom asks.

  “What?”

  “I asked you if you wanted to watch a Seinfeld rerun when you got back.”

  “Yes!” I say, shooting my arm in the air like a cheerleader. “Definitely! A Seinfeld!”

  Behind the wheel, I wait until I’m around the corner and then dial Landon.

  “Landon?” I say, like I can’t believe it’s him. It’s been forever, so long that it’s almost incomprehensible to make sense of my past life squeezing like this into my current life.

  “It’s been a while,” he says, and the sound of his voice ignites nostalgia in me like the flick of an arsonist’s match. Not lust—I no longer crave Landon—but familiarity, like our shared past is still connected by live wires.

  “Why are you calling me?” I say in almost a whisper, because talking to my ex is the equivalent of cheating, and I already have enough judgment bearing down on me.

  “I’m running for Senate.”

  “I saw that.”

  “There is a potential problem.”

  “What kind of problem?”

  “Listen, Mary, don’t freak out, but there’s a photo,” he says.

  “A photo?”

  “Of us.”

  “From when? Doing what? And why’s it matter?” I flip on my turn signal, pull into the shopping center, and into a parking spot.

  “It’s when we met in DC at the Mayflower.”

  “As in ten years ago?”

  “I haven’t seen you since.”

  “I had Sally with me that day.”

  “The photo is of just you and me. You can’t tell that you’re holding a baby carrier.”

  “So they have a picture of you and me in the lobby of the Mayflower,” I say. “So what?” As though flippancy on my part will make this matter less.

  “I’m leaning into you,” he says. “I’m kissing your cheek.”

  “Oh, God.” My heart plummets to the pit of my stomach like on the antigravity ride I took the girls on last summer at Kings Dominion. I remember Landon’s harmless kiss. “We weren’t in the lobby then.”

  “No, we were leaving the hotel room. That’s the problem.”

  That day is etched in my memory. Is there somewhere private we can talk? I had asked, and then followed Landon up to his tenth-floor room.

  “But we were just talking. There’s got to be some way to prove that we were just talking.”

  “That’s beside the point,” Landon says. “What matters is how it looks.”

  “I don’t get it,” I say. “Why was someone taking a photo of you? You weren’t even the attorney general then.”

  “They weren’t after me,” he says. “The photographer was a snoop PI hired by the wife of one of my firm’s partners. She suspected him of running around and using the room at the Mayflower to meet his ‘friend.’ We just got caught in the crossfire.”

  For a moment neither of us says anything. Then I ask, “Have I been identified in the photo as your ex-girlfriend? Or whatever it was that I was to you.”

  “If it’s
any consolation, you can’t entirely see your face. Your head is down and your hair is everywhere.”

  I reach up and grab a handful of said hair. A wave of relief floods over me. “So maybe it’ll be okay.”

  “Let’s hope. I don’t know what this guy intends to do with the photo.”

  “Can’t you make a deal—buy it from him?”

  “If I make him an offer, he’ll know it’s worth something. It’s better to give him the impression that it’s worthless.”

  “Can you tell that it’s me?”

  “I can, of course. There’s a slice of your profile that you can see, plus if you know what you look like, you’d be able to tell.”

  “So my husband will know?”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  “God!” I say, squeezing the steering wheel. “How will you explain who I am, why we were together?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll just say you were an old friend and we happened to run into each other. I’ll explain that you were holding a baby carrier. That I invited you up to my room so that you could nurse. Yeah, that’s it. That’ll make me sound very pro-women, pro-nursing.”

  “That’s all that matters to you, isn’t it!” I seethe. “What about me? What am I going to tell Tom?”

  “Tell him the same story I’m going to tell. That you happened to run into me.”

  “In the lobby of the Mayflower? He’ll want to know what I was doing downtown. I had just had a baby. It’s not like I was working then.”

  “I don’t know, Mary! Make up some goddamned story. Say you met a girlfriend for lunch to show off your new baby and you happened to run into me.”