Random Acts of Kindness

by Lisa Verge Higgins

  “I’m afraid not, Zoe.” What had Nate been thinking when he got Sissy pregnant? Had he been thinking at all? “There’s a baby in the picture now. Your father takes his responsibilities seriously.”

  “Some of them, anyway.”

  That was the end of the conversation. Zoe popped her earbuds back in as the alfalfa gave way to a field of heavy-headed sunflowers.

  Later that evening, as they settled down in a nondescript motel in Bismarck, Zoe spoke into the dark. “I hope the baby is a boy.”

  Jenna rolled over and peered at the lump in the other bed. “You don’t want a little sister?”

  “Dad already has a daughter.”

  A sharp little burn in the center of her chest. It had never occurred to her that Zoe would fear being replaced. Jenna supposed it should have. Zoe was the only child, the princess of the house. How could she convince Zoe that she wasn’t going to be loved any less for the new sibling that came into her life?

  “There is going to be a lot of excitement when the baby is born.” Jenna hoped Zoe wouldn’t be there to witness it. “But your father is never going to love you less.”

  “If there wasn’t a baby, would you have forgiven Dad for cheating on you?”

  Jenna lay back against the pillow to better absorb the next blow to her solar plexus. Would she have forgiven Nate if he’d come clean before the pregnancy? Would she have forgiven Nate for having slept with a neighbor? Would she have forgiven Nate for putting her daughter in a position of hiding a secret from her own mother?

  Yes.

  God help her, she would have tried.

  Jenna heard a rustle as Zoe turned her head on the pillow. She debated the wisdom of telling Zoe everything, and then knew, instinctively, that it wouldn’t be fair to drag Zoe into the muck. She also suspected that if she told Zoe the whole unvarnished truth, she’d be handing her daughter a scapegoat.

  “That’s all hypothetical, Zoe. What matters now is that your father kept a terrible secret from me. Secrets tend to build walls between people. Like the wall this secret built between us.”

  “Mom, just answer.”

  “Don’t blame the pregnancy,” Jenna said. “That baby is an innocent in this mess. Just like you.”

  A day later, hiking through the wind-sculpted sandstone of Theodore Roosevelt National Park, Jenna was sucking on her water bottle as Zoe hit her with another tough one.

  “You’re going to move out of the house now, aren’t you?”

  No.

  She screwed the cap back onto her bottle. “I don’t know yet.”

  “What do you mean you don’t know? We can’t all live in that house. Sissy and you and Daddy and me and Natalie and the new brat.”

  “New sibling.”

  She debated how much to say. Nate had asked for the house in the divorce petition. He’d argued that the garage was his place of self-employment. He argued that it would be a great hardship for him to move it or refit a new workshop. Jenna suspected that argument—along with Nate’s position as the main domestic partner—would go a long way in convincing the family judge to grant him full legal custody as well as the house.

  She wouldn’t mind Nate living in the house with Zoe, but she couldn’t bear the thought of Sissy Leclaire in her marital bed.

  Jenna reached out to touch Zoe’s hair, slowly fading to its natural caramel color. “I won’t move far, I promise,” she said, drawing her hand back as Zoe ducked out of reach. “Like it or not, you’re stuck with me.”

  The hardest question came a day and a half later, standing amid a crowd of tourists in Yellowstone Park. They’d spent the morning hiking to the observation point for a view of the Grand Basin. Zoe’s ponytail bounced as she took the trail by leaps and bounds. They’d passed by evidence of a large quadruped. That had Zoe chatting about the disgusting job of having to identify animal scat as part of the Master Rangers badge. That led to a debate on Mrs. Garfunkle’s tutorial about how to be safe from bears. Soon they were whistling and stomping about until they laughed so hard they couldn’t whistle anymore.

  But now, waiting for Old Faithful to erupt, Zoe went silent where they stood on the edge of the crowd.

  Zoe said, “Why did he ruin everything?” She kept her gaze fixed on the hole in the ground, granting her mother no more than a three-quarter profile.

  Jenna thought how ironic it was that Zoe had been spending this whole cross-country trip staring out the car window asking the exact same question that Jenna had spent the whole journey trying to answer herself.

  She knew she hadn’t been the perfect wife. She didn’t bake cookies, or cook dinner, or go to all the soccer games. After twelve-hour days she rarely mustered the energy to cuddle up to him when they were finally together in bed. It was likely she’d rarely told him how much she admired his sculptural artistry, how much she appreciated coming home to a house that smelled of bay leaves and thyme, to a dinner warm on the table, to Zoe done with her homework and bathed and ready for a story.

  But she’d come to believe that these were the slicing knife points of her own insecurities. These were the faults she’d magnified in her own mind. When she stepped out of herself and looked at them objectively, they bore little relevance to reality. She made omelets most Sunday mornings. She went to every weekend soccer game. She even bought lingerie once in a while, swinging it merrily home in little pink store bags.

  She’d spent a lifetime caught in the thrall of insecurities. She couldn’t allow them to rule her anymore.

  Her daughter’s smooth brow grew furrowed as if she were confused at her mother’s stretching silence.

  Jenna could tell Zoe that this was the oldest, saddest story in the book. The bored housewife takes up with the milkman. The boss sleeps with his secretary. Somehow, Nate had put himself into a situation where he spent too much time with a free spirit who decorated her house with the branches of pussy willows because she knew they’d burst into fluff on Easter. Jenna could tell Zoe that her father had been thinking with his limbic brain. He’d acted like a thirsty man who reached for the nearest beer.

  What was it that Claire once said? It was okay for a Buddhist to tell a little white lie, as long as it was done for the greater good. Well, Zoe was thirteen years old. She was just starting to feel the tidal pools of emotional attraction. The last thing Jenna wanted was to see her daughter poisoned with cynicism. Love came only with trust and faith and hope. This situation mustn’t destroy Zoe’s sense of goodness in the world.

  So Jenna drew her hoodie closed and fixed her gaze on the stretch of pines beyond the geyser. “Honestly, I’ve been asking myself that same question, Zoe, over and over and over, for close on to five thousand miles. Maybe someday I’ll realize I played a part in what happened.”

  “He’s ruined everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  Zoe peered into her mother’s face as if she were trying to gauge the weather. “You’re forgiving him.”

  Jenna’s jaw muscles tightened. She certainly hadn’t reached a state of forgiveness, but she was willing to take a step on the road to trying.

  Then Jenna did what she’d wanted to do since she followed Zoe to the observation point for the Grand Basin. She reached out and threaded her fingers through the hank of choppy hair that obscured her daughter’s face, surprised when Zoe didn’t jerk away. Jenna didn’t want Zoe to hide behind all this hair anymore. So she pushed it back, back, so she could better see those beautiful, hurt eyes.

  “No matter what happens,” Jenna said, “I’ll forever be grateful to your father that he gave me you.”

  *

  Zoe’s nervous chattering about the first day of the school year sputtered to a stop just outside Spokane. The kid who’d sprawled in the passenger seat cradling Lucky in her lap, crunching on SunChips, and pointing out the rainbows in the fog-shrouded foothills of the northern Rockies popped her buds back in her ears once she realized they’d be in Seattle before nightfall.

  Caffeine was the only th
ing keeping Jenna alert at the wheel. The last stretch since Yellowstone had passed in a two-day blur of quick rest stops and the scent of exhaust and burning rubber. She’d promised Zoe she’d get her back home before the first day of school, which was tomorrow. The next two hundred and thirty miles loomed before her, miles and miles to go.

  Yet, despite her fatigue and the ache in her lower back, she felt an almost uncontrollable urge to ease up on the gas. These miles with Zoe—now dozing, her head rocking on the seat, her eyes finally clear of the eyeliner that had rimmed them since Pine Lake, her face creased with the press of piping against her cheek—had been some of the best times she’d ever spent with her daughter. Yet every mile closer to the house that was once her home brought her closer to the troubles she’d run so far away from.

  She would have closed her eyes against those troubles if she wasn’t going seventy-six miles an hour. She would have blocked them out of her mind if, every time she tried, Nicole’s face didn’t rise up in her mind to insist she stop avoiding conflict, if Claire’s voice didn’t remind her to live mindfully, to acknowledge her thoughts and feelings rather than push them aside. Her friends hadn’t been in the car for the last three thousand miles, but they were traveling with her nonetheless.

  It was 6:30 in the evening by the time Jenna turned the balding tires of the bug-splattered, mud-stained Lumina onto their street. She pulled the car into the driveway next to Nate’s Prius, but not before noticing the For Sale sign on the front lawn of Sissy’s house.

  She turned the key, and the car shuddered off. Zoe straightened up, shoved her iPod in her backpack, and bounded out of the car. Jenna pulled the key out of the ignition. Through the curtained window, she saw Nate’s familiar shadow moving in the kitchen.

  “Mom, pop the trunk.”

  Jenna realized she was still gripping the steering wheel, immobile. She hit the yellow button and the trunk opened. She pushed open the driver’s-side door and unfolded herself from the seat, slapping a hand on the gritty car roof as her cramped legs nearly gave out beneath her. She shook them out and noticed that the small front lawn had been neatly mowed. Nate had edged the flower beds and added a fresh heap of mulch.

  She heard the front door squeal open. Nate walked out to the edge of the porch. A dish towel lay over his shoulder. He rested his hands on his hips, his gaze and his smile fixed on Zoe.

  Zoe didn’t acknowledge him at first. With Lucky tucked under one arm, Zoe tugged her enormous camp duffel out of the trunk to hit the driveway with a thud. She strode down the sidewalk toward the walkway, her chin puckered in that stubborn, I’ll-do-it-myself way as she rolled the heavy duffel on its back wheels. When Zoe turned into the walk and finally looked up at her father, her face was stone.

  Nate padded down the steps to intercept. “Hey, pumpkin,” he said, reaching for the handle. “How was your trip?”

  Zoe turned a shoulder so her father couldn’t reach the duffel. “It was fine.”

  “C’mon, hand it over.” He reached for the strap again. “Something tells me it’s full of laundry—”

  “Dad, you don’t make it out of Wolf Cubs without knowing how to do your own laundry. Right, Mom?”

  Not waiting for an answer, Zoe shot by her father and yanked the duffel one-handed, bump-bump-bumping it up the stairs before disappearing into the house.

  The small muscles of Jenna’s neck tightened as the plates of her mental armor clattered into place. Now that the Zoe buffer was gone, she braced herself for the angry accusations she’d known would fly from the moment she decided to short-circuit Nate’s end-of-camp plans and instead drive cross-country alone with Zoe.

  He stood empty-handed in the driveway looking through the open door. “Now I know what it feels like.”

  “What?” She threw the word like a gauntlet.

  “To have Zoe angry at me instead of you.”

  Jenna swayed from bracing for a hit that never came. She took a hard look at Nate as he jerked his hand through his hair. His T-shirt formed loose folds across his abdomen. Mauve hollows set off the color of his eyes. He looked like he needed a shave, a haircut, a good meal, and about twenty hours of sleep. He certainly didn’t look like a man upended by love.

  His mouth moved in what may have been an attempt at a smile. “I know Zoe hasn’t been acting like that the whole trip.”

  “She’s been wonderful.”

  “She’s grown about four inches.”

  “She also dyed her hair purple.”

  He raised his brows.

  “You’ll see when she takes off her baseball cap. Plus the new piercing.”

  She didn’t add anything more. She had a feeling Zoe would be displaying a lot of war paint and attitude in the days to come.

  He said, “Anything left in the car?”

  “Nothing but chip bags and half-filled water bottles.”

  And Jenna’s own luggage, of course. Plus the box of mementos—​Zoe’s old lovey, Pinky Bear, and the photos she’d taken off the mantelpiece. The French press. And trinkets she’d gathered from Salt Lake City, Cheyenne, Chicago, Niagara Falls, nothing but pinpoints on a coffee-stained map that now held a hundred thousand memories.

  She heard a happy yelp from inside the house and, with a twinge, she realized that Zoe had taken Lucky inside with her. It was a seven-year-old Zoe who’d insisted on rescuing the ragged little creature from the pound all those years ago. Lucky was Zoe’s dog. Suddenly Jenna understood the impulse three weeks ago to sweep Lucky into her arms and make Zoe’s pet her buddy on the road trip.

  Nate still hesitated where he stood on the walkway. He shifted his stance and rubbed his jaw, as if he were searching for something to say. She didn’t know what to say, either. Maybe it would be better if they didn’t say anything outside the presence of lawyers.

  She swung back to the car, resting her hand on the open door. “The mediation meeting is still set for next Friday, I assume?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell Zoe I’ll see her after school tomorrow.”

  “Wait. Where are you spending the night?”

  “A hotel,” she said. “As usual.”

  “I’ve seen some of those hotels you’ve been staying in.” He thumbed the scruff on his chin. “The Silver Dollar in Reno. The Hotel No-tell in Iowa? That sleazy honeymoon place in Niagara Falls? Hell, I know you’re out of a job, Jen, but we’ve got enough savings. You could have kicked it up a notch.”

  Jenna froze with her hand flat on the roof of the car. Her mind stumbled, raced. She knew that Zoe had been posting photos of their road trip online. She knew that Nate would be able to see those updates. In fact, she’d taken a measure of guilty vengeance in knowing he would see her having a great time on vacation with the daughter he’d all but single-​handedly turned against her. She ran her hand over her head and felt again the soft peach fuzz. He hadn’t made a single comment about her baldness.

  Then she realized that she hadn’t been in Reno, or Iowa, or Niagara Falls with Zoe. But she’d been all those places with her friends.

  If Jenna had to guess, she’d say Nicole must have invited Nate to subscribe to Claire’s cancer blog.

  Nate said, “Stay here, Jenna.”

  He spread a hand toward the open door. She looked at him, at the house, not understanding.

  “Stay here,” he repeated. “Sleep tonight in your own bed.”

  Out of the house drifted a mouthwatering smell. A sirloin roast, she was sure of it, that lovely blend of juices and rosemary and thyme, dissonant now, because this was once the smell of homecoming. Jenna looked at him more closely. She saw the shame sweep over his expression like a shadow. Once again he couldn’t meet her eyes. His shoulders bowed as he found great interest in something lost in the grass by his feet.

  He said, “I fucked it all up, didn’t I?”

  The admission should have filled her with self-righteous triumph. It just made her feel sad.

  “This past week I’ve been doing a lot of thinking.”
He swayed back on his heels as he shoved his hands into his pockets. “Someone has to leave this house. That someone has to be me.”

  Chapter Twenty-six

  Bertha the goat baaed an enthusiastic greeting as Claire pulled her luggage out of the trunk of Paulina’s car. As the goat, teetering on three spindly legs, strained against the leash, Claire approached and dropped her bags on the grass in order to grant the little beast a vigorous scratch. Behind her, the tires of Paulina’s car bit into the gravel as her sister pulled away, Paulina’s promise to return early tomorrow still ringing in Claire’s ears.

  Now she lifted her face to the sunshine and looked at her thirty-acre wood. This cabin had always reminded her of the forest hut where she’d lived in Thailand, a natural Nirvana, a sanctuary of serenity that she could retreat into should the secular life once again wear her down.

  Now she looked at the sagging porch, the tingling wind chimes, and the morning glory vines choking the posts. She realized if left unattended, in a year or two this whole place would be swallowed by the forest vines so thoroughly that no one would ever remember it had existed.

  Claire huffed out a humorless little laugh for finally seeing what had always been right in front of her eyes. Long before she’d been diagnosed with cancer, she’d set out to bury herself.

  She shook the thought out of her head and headed to the cabin. She had a bag full of laundry and a forest garden that needed tending. The floorboards creaked as she stepped up the stairs, waking the crow. He cocked a black eye in her direction. She pulled out a handful of corn from the bin by the door and tossed the grains on the porch. Jon Snow did his awkward glide-drop to the boards to fill his belly.

  Inside, the house smelled mediciney and musty. Dust whirled in the shafts of light pouring through the front window. Her tattered slippers lay discarded on the braided rug, as if she’d just stepped out of them. Through the hall, she saw a stack of mail teetering on the butcher-block counter of the kitchen along with a note from the teenager who’d been looking after the animals. Claire dropped her bags and pulled open the cabinet in search of cat food. Then she wandered to the porch, where she sang in Pali until she saw the blind possum poke his nose from underneath. She left him to his dinner and then got to work.