Because of Joe

by Because Of Joe [Contemporary Rom. ] (lit)

  Tell looked over at where Rags stood at the French doors leading to the deck. The sun shone in, highlighting her body through the thin cotton of her robe. He knew beyond all doubt she was naked under there. "Fine," he said. "She cooked breakfast and I'm still walking around, so apparently she's not going to poison me." He grinned at her look of indignation. "It was good of her to come. It means a lot to your grandmother having her here."

  "What does it mean to you?"

  Tell started, and stared at the phone for a moment before saying, "I have to go, son. You drive carefully coming down, hear? We love you."

  Ben was laughing when he said, "Love you guys, too, Dad," and hung up.

  Rags turned from the window. "I'm surprised you're not at work. Harlan wouldn't consider his death a worthy reason for taking off."

  He shook his head. "I stepped down as CEO. I still work for Maguire, as a consultant, but I've taken a couple of months off. I answer phone calls and faxes, but that's mostly to reassure people that they really do know more than I do and I'm not the boss any more."

  She stared at him, and he saw the disbelief settle like a mask onto her face. "You," she said, "gave up control voluntarily?"

  "If I'd ever had control of anything," he said flatly, "our lives wouldn't have gone the way they did."

  She didn't argue with him, and he wished she had. Surely it hadn't all been his fault. She'd been inflexible, too.

  "You need groceries," she said suddenly. "Is there a car I can use?"

  "Yes, or I can take you."

  "Whatever." Her voice sounded indifferent, and he was surprised that the apathy bothered him. "I'll get dressed."

  It took him a few seconds to realize she wasn't going to move until he left the room. "I'll meet you downstairs," he said gruffly, and closed the door behind him.

  ~*~

  Good heavens, she'd almost dropped her robe right in front of him. What was wrong with her? They were little more than strangers, for God's sake. She didn't even know how he took his coffee any more. He'd made a pot of a decaffeinated brand this morning while she cooked breakfast. Later, she stared in disbelief as he washed down what looked like a handful of vitamins with a glass of ice water. The Tell she knew would never have taken so much as an aspirin for a headache without being tied down.

  She checked with Ellis Ann to see if she needed anything, before joining Tell in the kitchen. When she walked in, he was on the telephone, frowning at a sheet of paper in his hand. He looked up when she entered, the frown lines crinkling into a smile, and she felt her heart bottom out.

  Some things had changed, to be sure, but others were definitely the same.

  She commandeered scissors from the desktop in the corner of the kitchen and sat at the table with coffee and the inserts from the Sunday paper, clipping coupons while Tell conducted business on the telephone.

  Déjà vu all over again, she thought wryly. How many times had they played out this very scene? Only then the kids had been playing outside the windows, with the boys ganging up unmercifully on Marley. Any minute now, Tell would get off the phone and make some snide remark about Rags clipping coupons and she would snap back that her kitchen was not an extension of his office. Only this wasn't her kitchen, she reminded herself, and the kids weren't playing outside any more. They'd grown up and found lives of their own, lives in which their parents had only a place on the perimeter.

  Tell hung up, poured a cup from the thermal carafe holding decaf, and said, "There are some coupons in the drawer there. Did you find them? Mama cuts them religiously, but never remembers to use them."

  "She does?" Rags had never known Ellis Ann to enter her own kitchen on a regular business, much less a grocery store.

  He nodded, coming to sit across from her and tear out the coupons that had perforated edges. "She's lost out here. Her friends, her whole life, are on Glory Ridge Highway. I offered to take her into town sometimes, but she wouldn't leave Father for that long. Some of the women come out here, but it's like Mama's life was in limbo."

  "Like yours?" she asked.

  He hesitated, sipping his coffee and separating the colorful coupons into neat little stacks. "I guess so," he admitted finally, "but rather than being in limbo, the life I knew is over." Bleakness turned the blue eyes almost pewter. "Again."

  "But-" Rags stopped, her scissors in mid-clip. She knew exactly what he meant. With the signing of the papers Linda would send, the life she knew would end, too.

  But she wasn't Tell Maguire. Glad Rags had never defined her, only earned her a good living and kept her from obsessing about laundry detergent, talking to plants, and feeding stray cats. Good heavens, if she'd talked to her philodendron, it would probably have grown into a jungle that covered over and choked Noblesville, Indiana. And, actually, she did feed stray cats, but she didn't consider it a failing. At least not much of one.

  "No," she said, "it's not over. It's like you said, in limbo until after the funeral. Then Mama and the kids and I will go home and it will start up again. It will be the rebirth of Tell Maguire."

  He looked thoughtful. "Rebirth, huh?"

  "Uh-huh. You can be anything you want to. You can go back into that corporate life you always loved, or travel around the world taking pictures, or stay here and be a beach bum. You've got money, you still look good, and there are no family ties holding you back." The bitterness she'd felt in the airport the night before welled up inside like hot oil, lacing her voice with an ironic edge.

  "Loved?" He stared at her. "You think I loved it?"

  The oil splattered and sizzled, and the irony hardened into anger. "Of course you loved it. More than the kids and me, anyway. Your first loyalty always lay with Maguire Industries and with your father, never with us."

  "And what about you?" he shot back. "You were so determined that our lives be separate from the company, and my father, that you hated everything involved with either of them. You got mad when I had to conduct business from home, mad when we had to do social things that were work-related. You were upset when I traveled, but when I was home, you didn't have any time for us. Us, as in you and me."

  "I was the kids' mother, for God's sake." Light reflected off the scissors' blades when she waved a hand in agitation. "Someone had to take them to practices and to buy their shoes. Someone had to make sure they ate right and said please and thank you and got up on time."

  "I was their father, don't forget. I was there for them as much as I was able to be. Good God, I flew home from New York for a football game and then flew back the same night."

  "And your father raised ninety kinds of hell about it. You spent all fifteen minutes you had at home on the phone with him, smoothing things over."

  Tell got up and walked to the counter in the kitchen. He came back with the two coffee carafes and refilled their cups. His hands shook, and Rags knew a moment of regret. Why had she done this? What was the point of putting them both through arguments that had had no resolution twelve years ago, and needed none now?

  "Maybe," he said, his voice quiet, "you weren't as good a listener as I always gave you credit for being. I spent fifteen minutes telling the old man if he didn't like the way I did my job, he should find someone else to do it." He resumed his seat and lifted his cup to his mouth, looking at her over its rim. His hands still shook slightly.

  Rags felt herself becoming lost in his unhappy blue gaze and in the past. Had he really told his father that? She remembered the evening so clearly: Ben's jubilation that Tell had gotten home in time for the game, the twins' badgering their father for attention, Joe's quiet despair over entering junior high. She'd been so angry that Tell was on the phone, and had let him know about that anger in a few pithy comments he didn't respond to.

  But they had all sung on the way to the airport and laughed uproariously at Joe's changing voice. She and Tell had kissed goodbye with dramatic and unfeigned passion, inciting catcalls from the rear seats of the van. They had, once again, saved the day by rescuing the moment.


  Hadn't they?

  "I'm sorry," she said, and was mortified to discover her eyes were full of tears that splashed onto a coupon good for twenty cents off a four-roll package of Charmin toilet paper. "I didn't know that, and I should have, and I'm sorry."

  His gaze met and held hers, and he reached with a gentle forefinger to catch the tears that slid down her cheeks. "Don't." he requested softly. "There is no us to cry over any more."

  He got up again, coming around to where she sat and kneeling beside the chair. His lips replaced his finger as he kissed away the tears as he had all those years ago. She closed her eyes.

  "You're right."

  He chuckled and stood up, his knees cracking as he straightened. "See, I'm starting a new life already. You just agreed with me, and that never happened in the old one."

  ~*~

  They bought enough groceries to last at least a week, though Rags warned Tell that having Micah in the house over the weekend would shorten that prediction by at least half. They saved twelve dollars and forty-four cents by using coupons, a feat that delighted Rags until they stopped at the liquor store and spent several times that amount on beer, wine, and peanuts.

  After a lunch at their favorite restaurant, which left them groaningly full, they drove back to the house on the beach. Rags scrabbled for quarters for the bridge toll, but Tell pointed at his season pass with a supercilious smile that made her punch him in the arm and think how warm his skin felt through the cotton of his shirt.

  A strange car was parked in the driveway of the ice-cream-colored house, and Tell frowned at it as they walked past with their sacks of groceries. "Who's that?"

  As he spoke, a figure came from the direction of the beach, walking into the carport with a gait that seemed far too slow for the person Rags recognized instantly.

  Taller than his father and thin nearly to the point of emaciation, Joe said, "I'm sorry, Miss Rags," and collapsed.

  Chapter Three

  They'd argued all the way home from church. "It's our anniversary and my thirtieth birthday," Rags had said, her voice rising in spite of her best efforts to keep it low. "I love your mother, but I don't want to spend the day with your father. Is that so unreasonable?"

  "No, it's not, but we're not going to spend the day. We're going to have brunch, then we're going to take the kids out to the beach. We can even spend the night out there if you want. I can go to work from there and come back and get you afterward." Tell sounded exasperated and tired.

  What did he have to be tired of? It wasn't his birthday-or his life-that was being screwed up. He just went on his merry way, doing as he damn well pleased while she picked up all the pieces and kept them together with increasingly fragile emotional glue.

  "So big of you," she snapped. "'If I want.' What do you want? Obviously not to spend the time with us. You sound like you're doing us a big favor by going to the beach at all."

  "Mama, Ben's making faces at me." Marley's voice came from one of the rear seats.

  "Make faces back." said Tell.

  "Stop it, Ben," said Rags.

  They glared at each other, and Tell almost took off a piece of his mother's aged magnolia tree when he turned into the driveway of the mansion on Glory Ridge Highway.

  "Who's that?" Micah's seat belt clicked open and he leaned forward between the front seats. "There's never any kids at Grandma and Grandpa's."

  "Where?" Ben and Marley crowded in beside him, and they stared at the boy who knelt under the porte-cochere, stroking the ears of Ellis Ann's miniature dachshund.

  "Kids, stop staring, please," said Rags automatically, reaching for her door handle. "Tell, do you know who he is?"

  He shook his head. "I wonder if he's lost. He looks half-starved."

  They got out of the vehicle, the kids tumbling out like puppies in their eagerness to see who the boy was who just might make this duty visit to Grandma and Grandpa more interesting than usual.

  "Children." Ellis Ann came through the porte-cochere to greet them. She touched the boy's head as she passed him, air-kissed her son's cheek, and gave Rags a hard hug before turning to Ben and the twins. "Come inside and help me put lunch on the table, please. Cook has been hiding a chocolate cake from your grandfather all morning, so you must be very nice to her."

  The children followed Ellis Ann, casting curious looks back toward the boy playing with the dog.

  Rags approached him, Tell right behind her. "Hello."

  He straightened immediately, a smile lifting one side of his mouth. "Ma'am. You must be Miss Rags."

  The sense of foreboding was as sudden and total as a storm cloud eclipsing the sun. Rags had to fight an urge to run after Ellis Ann and the children, an even stronger one to cover her face and weep. She hadn't meant to be so angry with Tell, really she hadn't. She would take back the furious words, the spiteful thoughts, if only that could stop what was about to happen.

  "Yes, I am," she said, staying put and not covering her face. She was even able to smile at the boy in front of her, the boy with a familiar-looking mouth and ocean-blue eyes that weren't as innocent as they should have been at his age. "And you're...?" Her voice rose into a question, and she had to force it down to keep hysteria from taking it over.

  "Joe."

  She offered her hand. "This is Mr. Maguire."

  He shook her hand politely, his grip firm. "Yes, ma'am, I know who he is." He nodded toward Tell, the movement stiff. "Sir."

  "Joe." Tell nodded back, his expression puzzled.

  "Tell 'em your last name, boy." Harlan Maguire, carrying a tumbler filled with amber liquid, came through the porte-cochere to stand nearby. He glared at Tell as he addressed the boy. "And tell 'em who your daddy is."

  The boy's face went white so suddenly that Rags reached out toward Harlan, as if holding out a slim Yankee hand would ever be enough to stop her father-in-law. "Don't!" she said urgently, stepping between him and Joe.

  "I'm Joe Maguire," the boy whispered. "I'm so sorry, Miss Rags."

  When he fainted, she caught him and held him to her and pressed her lips to his warm forehead as though he were Ben or Micah. Over the top of his head-the same sun-bleached light brown as Tell's-she sought her husband's gaze.

  "He isn't hurt, is he?" He knelt at Joe's other side. "Let me take him."

  He lifted the boy as though he weighed nothing and started toward the house. Rags followed.

  "I don't want that leftover scum in my house!"

  Harlan's shout made Tell hesitate for the space of a heartbeat, but not stop.

  In the library, with Rags mopping his face gently with a cool cloth, young Joe Maguire came awake. "I'm sorry," he said again, looking frightened. "What happened?"

  Rags smiled at him and inserted a teasing note into her voice. "It appears to me you've probably gone an hour without eating, and at your age, that's a dangerous thing. Miss Ellis Ann has some soup and milk here, but drink this orange juice first. Are you diabetic, by any chance?"

  Tell and Rags fed and teased him together as they would have one of the three younger children who were across the hall. Their hands touched as they made him more comfortable, met when they reached at the same time to stroke his sweaty, coarse hair back from his face. They smiled, as parents do, when the soup bowl and milk and juice glasses were empty.

  "Do you feel up to telling us a little about yourself?" asked Rags.

  "Yes, ma'am." He directed his gaze toward Tell. "I had a letter for you, sir, but that old man took it."

  "Then I'll just go get it from him." Tell grinned at the boy, but Rags saw the tension behind the expression. The sense of foreboding rose to the surface again, and she took deep breaths to counteract the feeling of suffocation it brought with it.

  "Are those all your kids?" asked Joe, after Tell had left the room. "How old are they?"

  "Ben is ten. Micah and Marley are eight."

  "Twins?"

  "Uh-huh. Twice as much trouble, but twice as nice, too. How old are you?" She had to p
ush the question out. Oh, Tell, is this the end of us?

  "I turned twelve in March."

  Twelve. He was twelve. That meant that, even if Tell were his father-and the blue eyes, light brown hair, and sweet half-smile did nothing to dispel the thought-this child would have been conceived before their marriage, probably before they'd even met. Rags knew she should have been relieved, but somehow she wasn't.

  "Where is your mother?" she asked gently.

  The look that crossed his face was one that no child should ever wear, and she was sorry she'd placed the question.

  "She died a while back," he said, and clamped his mouth shut.

  She would learn details about Joe later in that long bad day that she turned thirty. By the time she went to bed, she would have heard that he was Tell's child, the result of a high school graduation night liaison with a teenage acquaintance. She would know that Harlan Maguire had paid Joe's mother to get an abortion, and when she had not, had kept the child's existence a secret from his son until Joe himself arrived at the Glory Ridge Highway house with a backpack and a letter from his mother. A letter written before she freebased cocaine one too many times, and died sitting straight up at the kitchen table, with her eyes wide-open and startled.

  Those were all things she could have lived with. Harlan's manipulations did not surprise as much as sicken her. Nor did she blame her husband for an indiscretion committed thirteen years before.

  They took Joe home with them and installed him and his backpack in the guest room of their split-level. Rags' dream house where nothing could go wrong. When the children were all asleep, they poured tumblers of wine and sat on the deck outside their bedroom to talk about what they must do.

  "He's your child," said Rags, surprised he thought there was anything to discuss, "and he'll be mine, too, after I get used to the idea. We'll tell the children the truth as far as we think they can understand it, adopt Joe, and go on with our lives."

  "My father suggested we send him away to school, and to camp in the summer," said Tell, his voice distant and laced with a kind of coldness she hadn't heard in it before. "Places where they can deal correctly with his diabetes, which neither of us knows the first thing about."