A Morning Like This

by Deborah Bedford

  “It’s a thought.”

  “If I could give you a present, Abby, I’d give a morning. I’d give Mike a morning, too.” She laughed. “I might not live with him through it, but I’d give it to him.”

  “Mike’s lucky, having you feel that way.”

  “You know how the TV shows always make you feel like it’s these huge things in your life that matter? Those moment-in-time errors or victories that change everything?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Well, I don’t think that’s right. I think it’s the morning-times that change our lives, Abby. The times we’ll give ourselves permission to start fresh.”

  “Maybe. Maybe so.”

  “You mind if I have a look at those flowers now? At least I can do that much.”

  “They’re down in my office.”

  “I’ll just come down there with you. No sense you carrying them all the way up here.”

  They took the cat out with them and went down to the office. There they stood with arms crossed, surveying the monstrous bouquet from every angle, shifting their weight from one knee to the other the same way they’d survey some imposter artifact in a museum.

  “Well, I know what let’s do,” Sophie said finally. “Come with me.” She gathered up the vase in her arms, spilling water and bits of greenery on the pine floor. “Here.” She started out the front.

  “Soph? What are you doing?”

  “Come with me. You’ll see.”

  “I don’t know if you should go outside in plain view or not. Mike knows you’re here.”

  “What is it? The cat can’t come in? I can’t go out?”

  A rust-riddled pickup jostled up the street toward them, one window halfway open and the other broken out and covered with tape and Saran Wrap. The music system inside, which had cost probably three times more than the truck did, belted the Dixie Chicks.

  “I’ve seen them do this in Cheyenne.”

  Sophie stepped right in front of the truck. Brakes screeched.

  Abby flew off the curb toward her. “Sophie!”

  “Hey,” Sophie called out to the driver. “You want to take a few of these roses home?”

  The disconcerted man, who’d managed to stop with only inches to spare, turned down the music, stuck his head out the window, and spit tobacco juice in the street. “How much you want for a rose?”

  “Nothing. They’re not for sale.”

  “Then why are you standing out in the middle of the road, lady? You’re going to get yourself killed.”

  “I’m giving these away.”

  “Giving them away? Why?”

  “Because of what day it is.”

  “What day is it?”

  “Today.”

  “Oh.” He laughed. “I was thinking this was something on the calendar I had missed. Some new Hallmark card or something. They’re always doing that so they can sell more cards. New things to make you feel guilty for if you forget.”

  “How many do you want?” Sophie licked her fingers and tugged one thorny stem from the oasis inside the pot. “I’ve got plenty.”

  He thought for a minute. “How about three? Could I take three?”

  “Sure.” Triumphant, she found two more pretty ones and handed the stems through the open window. “Just be careful not to stab yourself. Those thorns can get you.”

  “This is great.” He waved out the window as the truck started rolling and the Dixie Chicks began rocking again. “Thanks a lot.”

  All in all, after Abby had charged out into Hall Street and begun to hand out flowers alongside Sophie, they gave every last rose away. They gave some to a man who jogged past with two kids in a long-distance baby stroller. They gave one to a husband walking along with his wife and holding her hand. Sophie presented several to a businessman in a Lexus who was in a hurry to post flyers for a Western-art gallery walk over the July Fourth holiday. And last of all, they detained Floyd Uptergrove, Viola’s husband from church, who sauntered past them commanding a team of three anxious Chihuahuas.

  “You think I need to give Viola roses?” he asked as the Chihuahuas strained to overpower him. Several small, unused poop-bags protruded from the brim of his fishing hat. “I’ve been taking care of that woman for fifty-nine years now, and look where it’s gotten me. It’s made me bald as a bedpost and she calls my family outlaws, not in-laws. Oh, and my feet aren’t allowed on the couch, but the dogs are.”

  “Viola’s a beautiful woman,” Abby said.

  “You bet she is. Especially when she dresses up for church with that butterfly in her hair. I wouldn’t trade her for anything.”

  He accepted a final rose and walked on, so slowly that it took him five minutes to get past the next house after he left them.

  “I wouldn’t trade her for anything. Fifty-nine years.”

  Sophie and Abby watched him for a long time as he ambled out of view.

  David and I will never have anything like they have. I always thought we would, but not anymore.

  Sophie led the way back to the shelter and pitched the pretty urn into the dumpster beside the garage. They both heard it shatter.

  “One afternoon, well lived.” Sophie laughed and dusted her hands together with spirit. “Guess that takes care of that.”

  Chapter Eleven

  As Abby poured Brewster’s kibbles into a bowl, she heard the patio door open, sensed the oppression, and knew David had come in from his run.

  For several dense, smothering moments, he didn’t speak. Neither did she. Then, finally, “Abby—” He spoke in undertones so Braden wouldn’t hear them.

  “No,” she whispered. “Don’t say anything.”

  So, for a while, he didn’t try. The two of them went about their morning as they’d done for the six mornings since David had started sleeping on the sofa. They were insufferably aware of the other’s whereabouts, their backs thrown up as protective barricades, repelling one another like opposite sides of magnets.

  She stayed carefully in the kitchen while he hurried to get his clothes from the bureau drawer.

  He stayed in the bathroom while she straightened the bed.

  She ducked away when he came in to pour coffee.

  He rummaged through the junk drawer to find a pen, refusing to meet her eyes.

  Saturday morning, a summer morning, and they had all the time in the world.

  He waited until she was sectioning a grapefruit, slicing the fleshy part of the fruit with a knife that had been a wedding gift, before he said in a hushed tone, “Braden took it all right, Abby. He didn’t ask too much. You would have been surprised.”

  Her knife paused. Then, pointedly, she cut one more triangle before she acknowledged what he’d said. “I don’t want to discuss this right now, David.”

  “We have to discuss it sometime. We can’t hide from it anymore.”

  “I’m not the one who’s been hiding.”

  “Come on, Abby. It’s Saturday. It’s the first time all week we’ve had time to begin this conversation when we could finish it.”

  “I’m not the one who ignored my marriage vows.”

  There. Let him have that to think about.

  Silence settled in again like fog, close and sultry and difficult to navigate. “Look.” He spoke in a low baritone. “We’re both adults. You’ve got to help a little bit here.” For the first time in days, he came around the table, moved close against her rigid spine. “Ab.”

  “No.” The knife clattered to the floor. Abby jerked her hand to her mouth and sucked the tender skin between her thumb and pointer before running cold water over the wound where she’d cut herself, her whole body throbbing with the sting of it.

  “Don’t push me like this. Don’t do it.”

  “Abby—”

  “You don’t know how Braden took it. You know how you think he took it. You just know what you think he knows.”

  “This isn’t my fault anymore. It’s yours.”

  “His whole world is falling apart and he doesn’t k
now it yet.”

  And David said, very quietly, “It doesn’t have to, Ab, if you don’t want it to.”

  Of all the things he’d done—telling Braden before she’d even had the chance to assimilate this, demanding a confrontation with her by the stream—this subtle shift of blame to her lap hurt worse than anything.

  “Oh, no you don’t,” she hissed through bared teeth as she turned off the faucet. “I’ve spent years counseling women who try to blame themselves when a man wrecks their marriage. I’m not going to let you do that to me.”

  “Okay,” he said, backing down quickly. “Okay.”

  Sorrow engulfed them, capturing them there, holding them together and apart. There could be no escaping this that had come upon them while they’d been so settled and smug and serene.

  Abby found the tin of Band-Aids on a shelf above her head. As she thumbed through them to find the right size, morbid curiosity finally got the best of her. She asked the question that had been needling her for days.

  Paying full attention to the tiny adhesive strip as she peeled off the wrapper, she asked, “You’ve talked to her, haven’t you?”

  “What?”

  “You’ve talked to her. That’s how you found out about the little girl.”

  He lifted his head, tossing it high like a stallion. From that one defensive movement, Abby already knew his answer. “Come on, Abby.”

  “Have you seen her, too? How many of her phone calls have you taken? I know you’ve taken one because I answered it. That night when we grilled outside. And then you lied. You said it was somebody from the bank.”

  He took a breath that seemed to go all the way to his Nike running shoes. “Yes. I’ve taken her calls,” he said with great command. “I have seen her. And I will continue to do so until we get this worked out.”

  “When?” she insisted. “I want to know all the times.”

  “Don’t do this to yourself. Don’t do this to us.”

  “No, David. I’m not doing this to us. You are. I’m only asking you to be truthful.”

  She’d spent years counseling, and he hated being analyzed. She made him feel so cornered and wrong. He practically growled at her, “Look, Abigail. There’s a little girl’s life at stake here. You seem to have forgotten that.”

  He couldn’t help himself; just the mention of the other child softened his voice. David heard the change himself. Deep within him, a natural human instinct had taken hold: paternity, as irrevocable as what he felt for his own legitimate son, and impossible to control or evade.

  He had a daughter.

  He’d never met her; he’d only seen her face in a photo, but their lives were inextricably bound by generations of family heritage and ancestors.

  She had a right to know he cared about her.

  No matter what mistakes he’d made, he had a right to love this new person who had been born of his own flesh and blood.

  “You can answer the question or not,” Abby said. “I don’t care.”

  “She called me on our anniversary. While we were gone that night and Crystal was babysitting. That’s when I heard from her first.”

  “Our anniversary?”

  “Yes.”

  Another memory gone. One more thing taken away that she’d thought she could hold dear.

  “That’s when she told you everything?”

  “No. She called so we could meet later.”

  “She called so you could meet? She came to Jackson?”

  “Yes.”

  With meticulous attention, Abby stuck one end of the Band-Aid to the outside of her hand and one end to the inside. So she’d been right. He had spoken to that woman, several times. When a phone call would have sufficed, she had traveled hundreds of miles to see him instead.

  For the first time today, she met her husband’s eyes. “It happened because you had second thoughts about marrying me, didn’t you? The baby scared you and you weren’t sure how to manage so much responsibility. So you did the most irresponsible thing you could think of.” Please say that isn’t it, David. This is your chance. Tell me I’m wrong.

  David plunked on the couch, presenting his spine to her at exactly the same stiff, contemptuous angle she’d presented hers to him. He brandished the remote control like a weapon and turned up the TV as loud as it would go.

  At least once a week after practice, the entire Elk’s Club baseball team rode their mountain bikes from Mateosky Field to Snow King Ski Hill, for a ride on the Alpine Slide.

  They would dart in dangerous, unpredictable angles across the streets, their matching black-and-green caps pulled low over their noses as they shouted to each other. They would fish in their pockets for money to buy tickets and be off up the lift to the top of the hill. Once there, they would disembark, choose a plastic sled with metal wheels, and plunge headlong down the winding cement half-pipe. When the mood struck, they would race each other, leaning left on a left turn, leaning right on a right turn, and bursting with a yell from under the bridge. They yanked hard on the brakes before they smashed into the rows of tires for safety at the bottom, then started all over again.

  It was a nine-year-old boy’s heaven.

  Today, halfway up the lift, two abreast and strung out fifty yards from each other, the Elk’s Club baseball team carried on a conversation.

  “Hey, Wheezer!”

  “What?”

  “Chicken’s butt.”

  “Shut up, Jake. Go back to your hole.”

  “I’ll race you!”

  “I’m in my hole. Jackson Hole.”

  “You’re gonna go down!”

  “No, I’ll take you down.”

  In the chair beside Jake Fisher, Braden sat without saying a word. He stared past their dirty, dangling cleats at the ground, getting a topside view of hikers heading up Snow King. He rode with his lower lip folded between his teeth and his baseball cap slung low over his eyes.

  “Hey, Treasure!” Jake lifted up his shirt to show off his latest bike-wreck laceration with pride. “Look at this. It’s nasty, isn’t it? Look at the pus.”

  Braden didn’t look. “Sweet.”

  “I got it on that turn going by Cache Creek. Tire went right out from under me.”

  Again Braden didn’t comment.

  “I hit the handlebars.”

  “Sweet.”

  Braden wasn’t admiring the lesion nearly as much as Jake might have hoped he would. Jake touched it gingerly once more, trying again for sympathy. “My mom thought I might have smashed my spleen, but I didn’t.” He gave up and pulled his shirt down. “What you thinking about?”

  “Nothing much.” Which was a lie.

  Braden was thinking about all sorts of things. He was thinking what good stories he could tell about the vials and the tubes and the needles he’d seen in that hospital lab room. How they’d given him a cotton ball to hold against his arm and how a nurse drew a bear face on it. How they’d made his dad lean down and put his head between his legs right in the middle of everything while the nurse said, “Mr. Treasure, take deep breaths. You are about to faint!”

  Braden was thinking he could say, That needle was as long as Lick Creek going into my arm. And then they sucked out so much blood that they filled up five containers, and those containers were all rolling around on a tray. It was eeew, yuck, and I was brave to let them take it out and they took so much that I think they might use it to save somebody.

  It would make for a good story, all right.

  But for some reason, Braden kept thinking maybe he ought not to tell it. He kept thinking maybe he ought to keep it quiet, with how stirred up he felt in his heart about his dad and mom fighting with each other. He didn’t want anybody to know about that.

  Almost every morning of Braden’s life, Brewster had nosed open Braden’s door, creaking the hinges and barging his way in. Almost every morning, Braden threw back the covers for him and Brewster jumped in, nestling down low in the bed so no one could find him. Two mornings ago Braden had taken the
dog’s big, scruffy neck in his arms and hung on for dear life, ignoring the dog-food breath and trying to ignore the anger in his parents’ voices and the words he didn’t understand.

  “Hey, Brade. We’re at the top of the lift.”

  Jake gave him a shove because he’d almost missed getting off. When he jumped down, he carried his questions with him, low in his middle, along with a slight tinge of fear. His friends were already warring over the best sleds—the orange or the blue, or the one with the skid marks that Chase had commandoed and won races with last week.

  At first, Braden hadn’t understood what his mom and dad had been talking about. He hadn’t understood the hurt in his mom’s voice, nor the defense in his dad’s.

  As he listened, though, he’d begun to realize what they were whispering about. They were whispering about that little girl he was supposed to be able to help.

  It made him want to shudder, hearing how unhappy they were. He had heard them fight before, but he had never heard them talk to each other like that. Fear had chilled him; even the panting dog under the blankets hadn’t kept him warm.

  “Hey, Treasure. What’s wrong?” Jake lifted a sled and dropped it on the track. “Are you mad about something?”

  “No.”

  “Then what are you holding the line up for? It’s your turn.”

  Braden took the first available orange sled and settled himself feet first. He leaned forward into the course and hung on to the sides of the cart as it started moving, its metal wheels bumping over the seams in the concrete with a rhythmic thunk thunk thunk.

  Once, when they’d been in the third grade, Charlie Hessler had said, “The worst thing that could ever happen to me would be if my mom and dad broke up.” Three months later, Charlie’s dad got an apartment on Pearl Street and Charlie went to visit him on Sundays to watch football.

  As he went down the slide, Braden passed a patch of harebells, and thought of his grandma who loved harebells. He began to go faster, bursting through the quick sun-and-shadow of the pines. The brim of his baseball cap caught air and he almost lost it. He yanked it off and stuck it between his legs where it would be safe.