by Mia Caldwell
V: You are very little help. Ok, gotta go get the kid. ttyl.
So. I try to just go through my day, going through the physical motions while my brain races and my stomach twists itself into knots. I dress Maeve in a flowered dress with matching striped leggings. The fabric is this soft European cotton that makes it clear this scrap of fabric probably cost more than any clothes I’ve ever owned.
We play on the floor for a while and I’m hyper aware of the camera. It’s like I’m on the world’s most boring reality show. Maeve keeps rocking up onto her hands and knees. I wonder if Corbin will see her start to crawl in person, on a security feed, or not at all.
I’m in the kitchen, barely tasting my sandwich, watching Maeve slowly and deliberately pinch bites of scrambled egg and transfer them to her mouth, when my phone buzzes with a message from Asia:
A: Whatchoo gonna do?
V: Dunno.
A: Git it guuuurl… (dancing girl emoji)
V: What if “talk” means “I’m firing you”?
A: Okay, he said he’d pay you anyway.
V: What if he doesn’t?
A: What if he actually decides to give you the house and move back to Boston? You don’t know, so stop worrying. He probably just wants to say “wtf was that last night” and clear the air and move on. So all you really need to do is decide whether you want to move forward.
A: Hint: You do.
She follows it with the banana and donut emoji.
V: Stay classy.
A: :)
We wait an hour after lunch–because who are you going to believe, scientists or your Grandma?–and go out to the pool. Maeve splashes and paddles until she’s ready for a nap. Once she’s down for an hour or so, I check my email. I see the name of our school principal and click it.
She wants to let all of the teachers know that there’s going to be a meeting of the board of directors that run the charter school. She suggests that as many of us as possible should be there, so that they see some of the lives affected if the school closes. She’s going to pull in as many kids as she can, too. The meeting is next Tuesday at one p.m. I’ll need to ask for time off.
That letter was followed by a chain of emails from my fellow teachers. “Will you be there?” “Will you?” “I’m out of town” “What do you think will happen?” and so on. They had that slightly panicked tone that you get when you think you might lose your job with little notice. Those in the union will get placed somewhere, but the rest of us will be scrambling. And of course there’s the kids…They’ll just have to go to their districted schools, often woefully under-equipped to handle kids with a very limited grasp on English. If they could stay put, they’d pick it up fast. Kids are amazingly resilient, but many of these families are on the move, following the harvest. The time that they can get at Excellence Academy is like a life raft, breathing space where they can learn without having to first overcome the language barrier. And we’ve got a pared-down curriculum–we can skip the luxuries like California state history or learning cursive or even music and art (although it pains me) and cram in as much math, science, and English lessons as we can. I feel like we really make a difference.
And just like that? I’m done worrying about Corbin. I realize I’ve just been spinning myself up, letting it seem like this looming drama, almost just to kill time. If the school year was on, I’d have just said, “Hey, what’s the deal with the baby, pal? Why are you so weird with her?” and either moved on or dated him because in the school year, I do not have time for drama.
Right. Well that’s settled then.
A calm settles over me and I finish the novel I’ve been reading (spoiler alert: they end up together, happily ever after) and I even doze off for a bit until Maeve wakes up. We play a bit more, go for a walk before dinner.
Marta has made fish tacos and Maeve happily mashes avocado onto her tray and into her hair as we eat. By the time I have given her a bath and put her to bed, it’s nearly time to meet Corbin. I hop in the shower to wash off the scum of the day and change into a loose summer dress. I even put on earrings–which I never wear around the grabby Maeve–and a necklace. It feels good to dress up a little.
I step out into the kitchen garden at exactly eight and Corbin is there already, popping a cherry tomato into his mouth.
Chapter Seven
“Hi,” he says, “You look beautiful. Thanks for meeting me.”
“Thanks,” I say, feeling that calm I’d managed starting to slip a little. He looks great, of course, loose tan linen pants, blue linen shirt the same sky blue as his eyes. “So it’s not a business meeting?”
He smiles that cute crooked smile. "No. But I’m going to need your help to know what it is." He reaches out a hand and I hesitate a moment before I take it. But I do. “Let’s walk,” he says, “That always makes words flow better.”
We walk down a path that seems to be headed toward the vineyard. “So,” he says after a few moments of silence, “Do I need to apologize for kissing you last night? I hope not, but I will if that’s what is needed.”
I thought that taking his hand kind of answered that, but said, “No, you don’t” anyway. “I’m sorry for just running off, though. Especially if it was as weird and confusing for you as it was for me.”
“I was pretty confused, but thought maybe I’d just gone too quickly for you. Had I?” I can feel that he’s looking at me, but I keep watching the path.
“No. It was what I wanted, too. At first.”
“What changed?”
“I wasn’t sure at first. But now I know–I need some things cleared up.” I look at him now and stop walking. I take a deep breath. “Something has happened to you that closes you off. You don’t let your guard down. Even with your own baby, it’s like you’re watching from a distance. If this felt like you just wanted a romp in the hay…or the grapes or whatever, I’d just say sure, let’s do it.”
“You would?”
“Yeah, why not, we’re both hot and single.” I laugh and he joins in. “But I feel like that’s not what you’re after.” He shakes his head. “Right. And if I’m going to go any further with this, I need to know what I’m up against. I need to read the warning label. I need a bit of backstory.”
Corbin sighs and his shoulders slump a bit. But he squares them back up and smiles at me. “Fair enough. I hope you have on comfortable shoes, this may take a while.”
“I only have comfortable shoes,” I say, smiling, “I’m a teacher.”
We start walking again, the little solar lights along the path coming on as the sun sets.
He blows his breath out and says, “Where to start? Um, I married Elise way too young. I thought I’d make my parents proud, finally getting my act together after being kind of a stoner screwup in high school and college.”
“Really?” That stuns me, he seems so…adorably square. I had him pegged as Student Council president.
“Oh yeah. I did just enough to barely get by and mostly skated through on charm. And family money of course. My dad had a bad heart attack when I was a junior and that was a wake up call. I cut way back on the partying, did my work, got the grades. But I felt like they didn’t really notice–fourth kid with a history of screwing around, it takes a while, I guess. So when Elise started saying we should move in together after college, I said we should just get married.”
“Did your family not approve of living together?” I asked. Heaven knows Grandma had given me the old “free milk” speech before.
"Oh, I doubt they would have noticed. Which is why I went with the wedding. No way to ignore that, right? I was young and stupid. I thought Elise and I would be a good match because we were from similar backgrounds. Both from Boston, our families had friends in common…We looked really good together." He chuckles, but it’s dry, like he knows it’s not funny.
“I mean, I’d never even really met her family. It wasn’t until we started planning the wedding…‘we’, that’s rich. ‘She.’ Well, ‘she and her mom
.’ It was like I’d gotten on an express train. After graduation, I started work in the Boston office of Yankee Cotton,” he sees my startled expression and adds, "yeah, not the best name, but that’s my family’s textile mill. Anyway. Elise was crazed with wedding planning. It was way too easy to take a wrong step, express the wrong opinion, so I started working longer hours, keeping out of her hair. When we did see one another we fought. Once, in a quiet moment, I said to her that maybe it wasn’t normal to be screaming all the time. She said, ‘That’s because your parents are the Cosbys. Normal people fight.’"
“Well, I’m glad your parents are not the Cosbys,” I say, “but it’s nice that she thought they were perfect.”
“Another sign of how little attention she paid. My parents are normal people who disagree sometimes, but they don’t scream and slam doors and storm out of the house.” He trails off, and we walk a bit longer, getting deeper into the vineyard. The only light now is the moon, but it’s a cloudless night, so it’s enough to see by in the wide spaces between the rows of grapes.
“And the wedding itself. My god,” he continues. “Our parents met for the first time at a cocktail party Mom and Dad threw. It was fine. Once the whiskey sours and martinis were flowing, they realized that Dad had gone to Harvard at about the same time Elise’s father, Charles had gone to Yale. So they did that semi-aggressive ribbing thing that drunk guys that don’t like one another but have to pretend they do sometimes try. It was uncomfortable and of course Elise blamed my parents. She really wanted me to work for her dad, who was in banking, so she ran mine down whenever she could.”
“So…why were you marrying her again? It had to be clear to you that it wasn’t going to work out.”
"Yeah, crystal clear. But I didn’t want to be the family fuck-up. I thought the stand up thing would be to make it work. Young and stupid, remember?
“No kidding.” There was a deranged nobility to it, though, I had to admit.
“So at the wedding itself–which if you can think of the most ostentatious Beacon Hill society formal party ever, you could just double it.”
“I can’t.”
“You’re lucky. White tie, gowns, the works. And, by about ninety minutes into the reception, Elise’s dad had realized who my dad was. He stormed up to my father’s table. ‘You’re Edward Corbin Pierce, aren’t you?’ And my dad was like, ‘yeah, we’ve met, maybe you should sit down.’”
Corbin is getting into the telling of the story, he’s slurring speech and giving a grand performance.
"’Edward Corbin Pierce, editor of the Harvard Crimson in 1968?’ And my dad says ‘Yes?’ and Charles punches him. Right in the face."
“What? Why?”
"Because in 1968, the Harvard-Yale football game ended in a 29-29 tie when Harvard came from behind in the last minute. The Crimson, my father, published the headline ’Harvard Defeats Yale 29-29.’"
“That’s really funny!”
“Yes, to most people, but to Charles Hamilton, Yale Quarterback, it was slander. It festered in his small mind for what, almost forty years? And then he punched his daughter’s father-in-law in the face at her wedding.”
“Let me guess, Elise took his side?”
“You’re a quick study. So I spent my wedding night on the pull out couch of the bridal suite.”
“Pft, should’ve made her take the couch.”
“Oh I would, now, as a 32 year old, having–as they say–been through some shit. But I wasn’t always the preening alpha male you see before you.”
I can see his smile in the moonlight and I return it.
“No, I was 21 and just trying to make things go well. For once. On the up side, she did get to have the most talked-about wedding of the season. Just like she wanted.”
“I’ll bet. I assume things did not get better?”
“No. To be fair, our honeymoon trip was pleasant enough. We spent a month taking the train around Europe, staying in nice hotels, eating good food, seeing great art. Even Elise didn’t have a lot to complain about once she got past the lack of ice cubes. But as soon as we came back and I started working, she was worse than ever. She’d decided not to get a job right away because all that sightseeing had convinced her she should open a gallery. But she wanted to make our house perfect first and she threw herself into that, tormenting every carpenter and tradesman in Boston. Nothing was ever good enough.”
Corbin sighs, and I can see that his shoulders are a bit slumped again. It’s clear that getting this story out is hard work and I squeeze his hand. He turns and gives me a small smile before continuing on.
"After the recession in 2008, there was a big push for textile companies to move back to America. So I was looking into closing the factories that had moved to India in the 70s and reopening them in South Carolina, where other companies had gone. So I started taking trips to India, to see what would be involved in that. When you get to see India, you’ll know what it means when I say that India was a nice break from all the noise in our house. The constant hammering and sawing and Elise barking orders and her mother there all the time, badgering the workmen. Yeah, the Gujarat cacophony was welcome."
“Wow.”
“Yeah. But eventually Elise got fed up with my travel. Once the house was more or less to her liking, she threw herself into opening her gallery. And once she had that going, she wanted to entertain various art dealers and it annoyed her when I wasn’t home to present the front of the Perfect Couple. I claimed I had to be in India so often so that the move would go smoothly, but in truth I was dragging my feet so that I could spend more time there. So, she announced she was pregnant and that I had to stop travelling because the stress wasn’t good for the baby. When I told her we’d need to move to South Carolina, to open the new plant, she refused. She told me, again, that I should work for her father. And I refused. So we fought, every day. We fought in childbirth class. The instructor told us not to come back, that our energy was bad for the other couples and bad for our baby.”
“Maeve’s doing okay,” I say, suddenly feeling the need to defend her.
“She is.” Corbin squeezes my hand, “Things have been much better for her lately.”
He walks on for a bit, we’re winding in and out of the rows. The house, on a hill, glows above us like a fairytale castle.
“We fought in the ambulance on the way to the hospital,” he says at last, grimly.
“Even happy couples fight in labor,” I say.
“Yeah, but it just never stopped. Something started to go wrong on the way. The EMTs were telling her not to push and she was telling them to shut the fuck up, she’d do what she wanted. The last thing I said to her, when we got to the hospital and they whisked her away was ‘For fuck’s sake Elise, can you just stop being a bitch long enough to give birth?’”
I have nothing to add there, so we’re quiet for a bit.
“That’s the last thing I said to her. My wife. She hemorrhaged and died. Too quickly for them to do a thing. Her mother screamed”Murderer!" at me in the waiting room. She knew we fought all the time. She blamed me, saying it was our fighting that made the delivery go wrong. My parents had no idea anything was less than sunny. Well, until then."
He’s quiet for the length of a whole row. Finally he looks up at the starry sky and sighs. “This is the hard part,” he says.
I’m quiet, wondering how it gets worse than losing your wife in childbirth and having her mother call you a murderer.
“I left. I walked out of the hospital. I never even held my newborn daughter.”
Corbin’s voice is tight. I’m shocked, but I squeeze his hand and he squeezes back and is quiet for a while. I can hear that his breathing is ragged and I want to give him space to deal with it how he wants to. I don’t want to say “Are you okay” and open the floodgates because I think he’d hate that. But I don’t know. Because I don’t know him.
Finally, he takes in a deep breath of air and it only catches a little. "I went to India and I stayed for s
even months. My parents took care of Maeve. My sisters all have kids, so there was lots of baby gear around and they just stepped up and took care of this helpless newborn.
“God, I’ve been such a shit. I felt guilty about Elise dying. I was angry that she left me with a baby that…” he swallows. "Well, a baby I never wanted. And then I felt guilty about that. So I just ran off to India, presumably to work. I hoped I could either find spiritual enlightenment or work myself to death. In the end, it was spirits–booze–and I tried to drink myself to death. I was a completely self-indulgent piece of crap for about three months. I never spoke to my parents, I never asked about Maeve. They knew where I was, but left me alone, no doubt telling themselves they weren’t surprised it had come to this, a fuckup like me.
"And when I realized that, when I saw that I was falling right back into it, I fought back. I stopped drinking. I started learning yoga and lifting weights. I started to go out into the community and realized that if I moved the textile mill, I’d destroy all these lives, wreck this village. So I instead worked to make conditions there better, to make the plant more efficient and cost effective so that I could sell the rest of the company on keeping our operation in Gujarat.
“I even started to ask about Maeve. It’s funny, her name was one of the very few things Elise and I agreed on. We fought over the middle name–I wanted Frances, after the sister born two years before me that died in infancy, she wanted Eleanor, after her richest aunt.”
I realize I don’t know Maeve’s middle name. “Who won?”
“She did. I even felt guilty about resenting that at first. My parents had been sending me photos of her all along and I started printing them out and hanging them up. I started Skyping with them so Maeve could see my face. But I still couldn’t face going back. Boston can be a really small town in some ways and the Hamiltons had turned a lot of people against me. But, about two months ago, my parents called to tell me that the Hamiltons were threatening to sue for custody of Maeve, on the basis that I’d abandoned her.”
“Wow.”
“Well, I had. But they had seldom visited her at my parents’ house, since the Hamiltons and the Pierces were barely civil. So my parents offered me the vineyard. Bob Jenkins was retiring and rather than hire someone with actual knowledge about it, they’d send me out, away from Boston. It’s been in the black for years, I guess they figured I couldn’t screw it up too badly. So I came back home and had about two weeks of baby boot camp before they sent me out.”