“You’re kidding, right? You think I want to pet sheep?” Lucas asked.
“I want to go,” Max said.
“Then go, fat burger.”
“Don’t say that,” Juliette said. “We’ll all go, or none of us go.”
“All of us? All three of us?” Lucas’s sneering tone would drive her crazy or drive her off the road in a fit of guilt-laced rage.
“Grandpa and Mamie may want to go.” Juliette held the steering wheel with one hand and reached behind with the other hand cupped. “M&M’s, please.”
“Yeah, right. Mamie will love that idea.” Lucas pressed his feet so hard on the back of her seat that Juliette swore she felt the tips of his sneakers.
“Max?” Juliette shook her hand impatiently and again took a quick look in the rearview mirror. Max held up a giant bag of M&M’s and poured the candy into her hand. They’d bought it at CVS before getting on the Mass Pike, adding it to the chips in a can, spray cheese, and three kinds of soda she’d already put in the basket. Nothing she’d brought on the trip was organic, nutritious, or homemade, making it seem like their car belonged to an entirely different family.
Juliette shoved the candy in her mouth. Shells cracked, grainy chocolate coated her tongue, and she felt a moment’s relief.
• • •
She pulled into the driveway beside her parents’ perfect blue-grey Queen Anne–style house.
Juliette still felt as though she competed with this house for her parents’ consideration. Each time the house’s stately white balusters got a glossy new coat of paint, she had the urge to carve her initials into the gleaming wood.
It irked Juliette how her parents had trusted every one of her actions and choices since she was a child. There were only a few things her parents checked on. Her father made sure that first her bikes, and then her cars, were in good order, and her mother kept watch over Juliette’s beauty—making it clear that she considered Juliette an extension of her own loveliness.
Displaying some rebellious spirit, at least enough to worry her parents, might have brought relief, but she seemed destined to be the vigilant one in the family. Her parents were the ones who stumbled after too many drinks. They were the ones performing not-furtive-enough experiments with marijuana when Juliette was seventeen and should have been the one getting stoned. Watching them giggle their way to the bedroom had turned her stomach.
“Lucas, get the large bag from the back,” Juliette ordered.
Lucas struggled to pull her overstuffed suitcase from the trunk. “Jeez, Mom, what the hell do you have in here?”
Juliette started to scold him for swearing and then stopped. If she was going to ask him to do Nathan’s jobs—carry the heavy bags, check the tires before they got on the road—then she might as well let him complain like Nathan.
Sliding down the slope of bad parenting took no time at all.
“Max, you take your and Lucas’s backpacks.” Juliette knelt on the backseat, reaching for the few snacks they hadn’t stuffed in their mouths and cramming the remains in wrinkled plastic bags. These she pushed deep into her parents’ outside trash bins.
• • •
Juliette recognized the depth of her parents’ concern over Nathan’s absence when they offered to take her and the boys to the county fair. Her mother and father took her to the antiques show at the fairgrounds when she was a child, but never the county fair. “Why would I want to see cows?” That had been her mother’s point of view. “Your school takes you, right?” That had been her father’s way of alleviating his guilt.
“Grandpa,” Max said, pulling at her father’s arm, “can we get fried dough?”
“Darling! Why in the world would you want that? Grandpa and I are planning to take us all to Gigi’s tonight.” Juliette’s mother turned to Juliette and gave her a familiar once-over. “The food is wonderful, but it’s casual. No need to dress up or fuss.”
Juliette’s mother wore the same style of clothes as during Juliette’s childhood. Perhaps they were the same clothes; her mother remained the same size. If a shirt or skirt wanted to make it into Sondra’s closet, it had best complement her dancer’s body and bring to mind Audrey Hepburn.
“A little fried dough once in a while won’t hurt the boys,” Juliette’s father said.
“But it might hurt you.” Her mother gave a significant glance to his midsection and then kissed him full on the lips. “I need you around more than you need the cholesterol.” She patted him on the butt with a flirtatious grin, and Juliette thought she might throw up from having to once again witness—with her boys, no less—her parents’ constant displays of affection.
“Eww,” Max said.
Lucas walked away, pretending to be fascinated by a bulky white horse lumbering toward them.
Her father laughed and then stage-whispered, “Tell you what, Maxie. What happens between grandfather and grandson stays between grandfather and grandson. Right, boys?”
“Does that mean yes?” Max asked.
“That means it’s time to take our leave.” He flung an arm around Max’s neck. “Come on, Lucas.”
Lucas looked at Juliette and then shrugged, walking away as though choosing the lesser of two versions of hell. She watched with mixed feelings as they left. Alone with her father, the boys would get more attention. Unfortunately, so would she.
“Fried dough. My God, what is he thinking? You’ll see how your father suffers later. And, of course, how I suffer with him.” She tucked her arm in Juliette’s. “Come. Let’s see if we can find anything that doesn’t smell or offend.”
Juliette hated her mother’s casual dismissal of an entire cultural happening. She hated it more that she, Juliette, also loathed the damned fair.
“So, no Nathan.” Sondra led them away from the animal corrals, which were divided into horrifying lines of pigs, cows, bunnies, and goats. The place was an animal prison.
“You look great, Mom,” Juliette said. “So does Dad.” This was true. At seventy and sixty-eight, either of them could pass for ten years younger.
“Don’t change the subject. However, thank you. We try to stay in shape, though I have to watch him every second.” Her mother gave the fond smile she reserved for Juliette’s father.
“I use your picture as a model of good skin care for all my clients,” Juliette said. That was a total lie. The last thing she needed was her mother’s picture staring down at her all day, but Juliette was well schooled in the art of deflecting her mother from topics Juliette wanted to avoid. Talking about her mother’s youthfulness might keep away the subject of Nathan.
“That’s flattering, sweetheart. You look nice also. Although, truthfully, you’ve put on some weight. You’re at that age, you know.”
When Juliette didn’t respond, Juliette’s mother sighed. “Sweetheart, I know that it’s because of Nathan. Women go in one direction or the other when their husbands leave. Most of my friends got thin as rails, but some just started stuffing themselves and didn’t stop. Honey, is that the road you’ve taken?”
The road she’d taken. As though Juliette had casually deliberated between staying slim or putting on weight. Fat or skinny, fat or skinny? Oh, why don’t I just get plump as a pigeon? That will be fun!
The sweet smell of cotton candy drifted over.
“He didn’t leave,” Juliette said. “I threw him out.”
Her mother looked shocked, as though Nathan were such a catch that only the most foolish woman would let him go.
“Why in the world—”
“I’m hungry.” Juliette unlocked her arm from her mother’s. “I’m getting a hamburger. Over there.” She pointed to a shack where teenagers flipped burgers and shook baskets of fries. Juliette hungered for the grease, the salty meat, and the blood-soaked bun.
“Oh, no. Not that, Juliette. Perhaps there’s a salad around here somewhere.” She put her hands on her hips—her lean boyish hips; nothing like the monsters jutting out from either side of Juliette.
“I don’t want a salad. I want something substantial.”
“Let’s save ourselves for tonight, at Gigi’s, where at least they’ll be worth the calories, okay?” Her mother gave a girlish smile, crinkling her Midwestern blue eyes and swinging her long fringe of blond bangs out of her eyes.
“Mom, don’t be such a cliché. It’s not like you.” This intense scrutiny was curious for her mother. Usually after a few pointed remarks, her mother just went on about herself and Juliette’s father. “Gordon said this.” “We went here.”
Her mother’s chittery-chattery expression dropped away. “Cliché? Fine, perhaps I’m a cliché, but you need direction. You need to take care of yourself. Sorry to be blunt, but honey, looking good is your business. What have you done, eaten nothing but chips and cookies since he left?”
“Did you not hear me say I threw him out?”
“It’s not always about who did the throwing. The question is why you made him go.” Her mother stopped walking and took Juliette’s hands between hers, forcing Juliette to look straight at her. “Maybe I wasn’t mother of the year, but I do care about you.”
“I don’t doubt that.” She did doubt that.
“Take my advice under serious consideration. It’s no picnic out there without a man.”
“It was no picnic in there either, Mother.”
“Why? Did he sleep with someone else?”
“Mom!”
“Don’t act so surprised. What? You think it never happened to my friends? But not to me. Do you want to know why?”
“No,” Juliette said.
“Because I’ve kept your father front and center. He’s my life, and he knows it.”
“We all knew it.”
“Don’t be such a child.”
“Once I was a child, Mom.”
“But you’re not anymore. This isn’t about poor, ignored baby Juliette. Grow up. You want to take care of your children better than I did? Get their father back.”
“You don’t know the whole story.”
“So tell me. But try listening to me like a woman, not my daughter.”
“Is that even possible?”
“It is if you can rise to the occasion.” Her mother pulled her under one of the food tents. People sat at long wooden tables eating every manner of forbidden food. Children nibbled at corn dripping with butter. Men bent over plates full of barbequed meat red with sauce and brown with grill marks. Women clutched burritos the size of small puppies.
Next to Juliette, a sunburned woman ran her tongue up a mountain of ice cream heaped into a cone. Juliette noticed the thick slab of fat hanging over the woman’s jeans and felt superior and then ashamed. She was just her mom with a veneer.
Her mother dug into her straw bag and took out two bottles of water, offering one to Juliette.
The sunburned woman was about Juliette’s age. She sat with a companion who had thirty pounds on Ms. Sunburn, and whose complexion spoke of sugar and whiskey.
Juliette took the water with gratitude. “He cheated on me.”
“I figured. That’s what I said to your father, though he tried to defend Nathan.”
“Dad defended him?”
Her mother touched Juliette’s arm. “Oh, Juliette, don’t worry about that. Your father is simply worried about you being alone, so he blusters a bit.”
“Dad didn’t believe Nathan would cheat?”
“Dad doesn’t like to think ill of people. Come on, let’s walk—I can’t stand the smell here.”
Her mother brushed a drop of water from her yellow linen slacks. Mom showed her age in odd ways, like her refusal to wear white before Memorial Day. Still, even as Mom closed in on seventy, and Juliette ran a business where women paid large sums for her beauty secrets, she felt homely and oafish next to her mother.
Her mother flicked Juliette’s hair from her face. “You remind me of your father. He’s always thinking the best, always trying to convince me how marvelous the world is. Maybe that’s why Nathan got away with cheating for however long you let him. You thought too well of him. It didn’t even occur to you that he could be doing that.”
When Juliette didn’t respond, her mother added iron to her words. “Look at you, weepy and getting chunky, waiting for Nathan to come to his senses. To make his decision.”
“I’m not doing that!” Was her mother right? Hadn’t she told him to find out if he loved that woman? To go see the child? “Fine. You’re right, Mom. You’re right about everything. But there’s a small detail you don’t know. He had a child.”
That stopped her mother. “The woman has his baby?”
“She gave it up for adoption.”
“My Lord. Well, you certainly are becoming more interesting, Juliette.”
Juliette didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, so she laughed, and then her mother joined in. They laughed hard enough that their mascara ran, and they had to find the ladies’ room. After they’d dried their hands and reapplied lipstick, her mother offered a summation.
“Have you thought that maybe the answer isn’t ‘Love me or love her’? We live in an imperfect world, Juliette. You may have to decide whether you want a flawed marriage or no marriage at all. Is it too broken to live with?”
Juliette wondered if she could live with Nathan knowing that he still cared for Tia, even if he just cared for her because she was the mother of his child.
He wanted to come home. He told her so each time he visited the boys. Juliette hated the empty space next to her in bed. She despised coming home to a house without Nathan. At dinner, with just the three of them, she felt as though they sat on a wobbly stool. But she didn’t know if she’d feel any better with him lying next to her.
It might be a whole new kind of loneliness.
CHAPTER 29
Nathan
“I’m waiting in front of your house.” Nathan pushed End button on his cell phone and disconnected with Tia. He’d spent the morning making sure that his clothes were perfectly pressed, his shave close—dressing to see his daughter as though getting ready for a date.
He still yearned to impress her, he wanted to show Caroline and Peter Fitzgerald that he wasn’t a loser, and he needed to demand courage of himself.
“We have to do it,” Tia had said. “We have the opportunity. Juliette can’t get mad at you anymore, right? She’s the one who threw you out.”
He wouldn’t tell Tia that he’d told Juliette they were going to see Savannah. Tia had already sounded halfway to hysterical when she’d called, saying, “Caroline came to me for a reason, and we need to find out what it is. We need to see if Honor is safe.”
There is no Honor.
She is Savannah.
It’s Lucas and Max that I’m worried about. How can they be safe without me?
“We have to step up to the plate. Please. Come with me,” Tia had entreated him. “Who knows what’s going on? We need to see where Honor is, and what she’s like, and who she is—”
Last night he and Juliette spoke briefly, their conversation revolving around the kids: soccer practice, summer camp schedules, and which nights he’d take them out to dinner. Then Nathan threw in the question: “Can I come home?” Perhaps it was his imagination, but he thought there was a chink in her armor when she hesitated before answering. Then, when after saying “No,” she added, “not yet, we’ll see,” he knew she was wavering.
While half listening about the cost of Max’s soccer camp, he considered telling Juliette about this visit to meet Savannah, and then, just as quickly, he reconsidered it. Then, he flipped again, realizing he had to tell the truth.
When he finished speaking, Juliette had been silent. Then he heard her muffled sobs. Why was she crying? Wasn’t this what she’d wanted? Hadn’t she told him to make it right with Tia? To go see his daughter? To see Tia, and then convince her it was finally over? That’s what he was trying to do, damn it. She’d made him feel as though he were torturing her. It was as though that previous conversation had neve
r happened.
“I just can’t talk to you.” She’d spoken so slowly, it was as though she could barely release those depressing final words.
What had that meant? Can’t talk to you now? Ever? This fucking week?
He missed his wife and sons so badly that he felt like the loss hung from his chest like a lousy badge. Patches of his old nemesis—eczema—broke out behind his knees. His stomach pitched in circles. Sleep seemed an impossible dream, and the circles under his eyes grew darker each day.
Tia slipped into the car, unusually quiet.
“Do you know where you’re going?” she asked.
“I already put the address in the GPS.”
“How do you know where they live?” Tia’s questions jabbed like challenges. She exhausted him, but he owed her, and he knew it.
He wanted to pretend that the other night had never happened. Bury it under a pile of being good. Coming that close to Tia had been playing with rocket fuel and matches.
“A little thing called the Internet,” Nathan said.
“I forgot how thorough you are.”
He turned a bit and smiled. “Once you liked that.”
“Once you liked me.”
“I never stopped liking you, Tia.”
“But you stopped loving me,” she said. “If you ever started.”
He kept his eyes glued on traffic.
“Did you ever love me?” she asked.
“Of course I did. I’ll always love you.”
“How will you love me? As though you’re my distant uncle? A brother? A kissing cousin?”
He took her hand and squeezed. “Don’t you think we’ll always care about each other in some way, for what we share?”
She pulled away from him. “I’ve spent the past six years trying to stop loving you.”
He didn’t know what to say. That she’d spent years in love with him while he barely thought of her was so damned sad.
“You broke my heart, Nathan,” Tia said simply, quietly. “Everything I did, it was about you.”
“I don’t think I knew that,” Nathan said. “I’m sorry.”
“I was stupid.” Tia shook her head. “Robin says I was never real to you.”
The Comfort of Lies: A Novel Page 24