by Robyn Carr
The living room was decorated in masculine colors of blue, gray, dark purple and brown. Walnut accent tables held a few decorator items—coasters, a scented candle, coffee-table books. A fireplace with a great granite hearth took up most of one wall. Even the logs in the tray beside it looked impossibly clean.
The kids stared at the entertainment center as if it were a rocket ship. Stereo, DVD player, large HD television, DVDs, speakers, knobs by the dozen, dials, all enclosed in glass. Spotless, smearless, dust-less glass. And paintings—prints, actually. Could he have chosen the prints? Also behind glass. Two McKnights. McKnight was known for his happy, homey, bright settings of rooms devoid of people. No hazy pastels, but sharp-featured living-room scenes crowded with things, not people, paintings of rooms that seemed to celebrate themselves with vibrant aloneness. Like Mike?
“My God,” she muttered, “I might have to feed you kids in the bathtub.”
“He said he was a little sloppy,” Carrie told her, “but I think he’s learning very good.”
“Yeah,” Chris replied absently. “Don’t touch anything. See that coaster there, on the coffee table?” She pointed. “That brown thing that you put your glass on so you don’t leave a mark on the table?” They nodded. “That’s the only thing in this room that I can afford to replace.”
“Are we going to put our glass on it to not leave a spot?” Carrie asked.
“No,” she said. “You’re not going to eat or drink anything in the living room.” She looked around fretfully. “I’m going to keep a bottle of Windex strapped to my belt.”
“I never eated in the bathtub,” Carrie said.
“Ate. And I’m kidding. Maybe.”
She felt a lump in her throat and turned them around before they could look with envy at the living room any longer. “Come on, let’s see if we can find where we’re going to sleep.”
Upstairs was not the showplace the downstairs was, but it, too, was immaculate. The bedrooms were large and airy and practically unfurnished. The only furniture in one was a set of twin beds, with not so much as a lamp or cardboard box in addition. The other room had a love seat, which, upon inspection, Chris found was the hide-a-bed. And there was a desk where Mike paid his bills. The desk had a glass top. Underneath the glass were a few pictures. One was a picture of a woman and child, and by the woman’s hairstyle, Chris guessed it was them. She stared at it a long time, the ones he had lost. Her heart began to split into a bleeding wound. Poor guy. How could you lose that much? It was incomprehensible. She had buried her parents before becoming a mother. She had since decided that the overwhelming pain of that still could not approach what a parent must feel when burying a child. Her throat began to close.
“Is that me with the lady?” Carrie asked.
“No,” she said, her voice soft and reverent. “No, honey. That’s Mr. Cavanaugh’s little girl and his wife. They died a long, long time ago. Way before you were even born.”
“Does he miss them, then?”
“Yes, of course. This is his private stuff, all right?” Private feelings. “I don’t think we should ask him questions about it. Okay?” Chris crouched so she could look into Carrie’s eyes. Her own wanted to water, but she tried not to cry over borrowed heartache. “In fact, I don’t think we should even mention we saw the picture, okay? Please?”
“Okay. Can we watch TV?”
“Sure,” she said, straightening. “If I can figure it out. Come on. Back downstairs, where you may sit on the floor and touch nothing.”
“I thought you said we could touch that brown thing?”
Chris was not in awe of Mike’s moderate, tasteful wealth, even if her children might be. She was in awe of him. There was stuff to steal here. How was he so sure she wouldn’t? How did he know she’d be careful? How could he do this, trust her like this? He knew nothing about her, nothing at all. Except that she was alone and had nothing. She felt a trifle insecure about using his discriminately chosen, carefully placed things, but her chief insecurity was that she didn’t deserve this charitable act.
Chris had grown up in a house that would make Mike’s place look like the maid’s quarters. The fireman’s house, in fact, was much like the place she and Steve shared the first year they were married. The kids wouldn’t remember anything so comfortable, however. The comparison to what they did know made her shudder, and the tightness in her throat grew into a lump of self-pity as she took the children downstairs to deposit them in front of the television while she made some calls.
Mr. Iverson excused her from her job for a few days and agreed to give her a hundred-dollar advance on her salary, which he would deduct from her pay over an extended period of time. She gave him the phone number where she could be reached and called the babysitter. Juanita asked her if there was anything she needed. In spite of the fact that they needed everything, she said nothing. Juanita, good-hearted and hardworking, had too little to share. At Carrie’s school, the secretary offered the names of places that might offer help. Chris didn’t mention she had already tried most of them, but simply informed her that Carrie would not be back for a while. Actually, she didn’t know where Carrie would go to school next, and she was grateful it was only kindergarten.
The call to the landlord was another story. Not a story of compassion, either.
“Well, Mrs. Blakely, when do you think Mr. Blakely will be able to return my call?”
“I’m sure I don’t know, Mrs. Palmer. He’s a little upset about the house, you know. We don’t know how that happened.”
Chris laughed hollowly. “It happened because the furnace was old, in poor repair and hadn’t been serviced in a good many years.”
“Ah, I see. You, of course, have the arson report?”
“Arson report?”
“Could you possibly have been…smoking?”
“I don’t smoke! Hey, listen, I’ve got two little kids, and we could’ve all been killed! We didn’t even get the car keys out of that old house, it went up so fast! Would you like to take down this number, please?”
“I’m sure we don’t need your number, dear, as long as the police know where you can be found.”
“What?”
“Well, we don’t want to make any accusations, naturally, before the investigation is complete, but I’ll take your word that you won’t leave the area.”
Chris was stunned for a moment. Then, thanks to the finesse she had learned too late from her missing ex-husband—who she hoped was at that very moment being subjected to some incredible torture that would leave vicious scars—she let out a knowing sigh.
“Mrs. Blakely,” she said smoothly, “my lawyer suggested that I find out when your husband will be available for a settlement meeting. We should probably talk before any further medical tests are run on my children so that you’ll be fully and fairly apprised of all possible expenses and punitive suits that could be forthcoming.”
“Tests? What kind of tests?”
“Smoke inhalation. Possible internal injuries. Possible brain damage. And, of course, stress, trauma, emotional—”
“What is that number?”
She recited Mike’s phone number.
Click.
Chris’s husband had been a con man. A wheeler-dealer. A schemer. A crook, a louse, a liar. But she couldn’t prove it. The sad truth was that she knew where every freckle on his body was located, she would be able to pinpoint his very individual male musk in a stadium holding twenty thousand people, but she had not known what he did for a living. Or what he did with her money. The word incomprehensible popped into her mind again, associated with catastrophic loss and the fact that she knew nothing at all about a man she had been married to for four years. Because she had been inside-out-in-love and feeble with idealism and ignorance.
While her children watched a nature program on a cable network, Chris brooded about her past. It was checkered indeed. Poor Aunt Florence.
Chris’s grandfather had started a furniture business as a young man; he
had started his family as a much older man. By the time Chris’s father was twenty-two and married, Grandfather was nearly ready to retire. His company, Palmer House, was respected and very successful. Chris was born into a family that included her young parents, her elderly grandparents, her father’s younger sister and piles of money.
When Chris was small, her aunt, Florence, spoiled her, played with her, babysat her and bought her lacy undergarments and expensive shoes to match every dress. When Chris was older they went on trips together—to Hong Kong, London, Tibet. They bought everything of leather, gold, silver and jade that they could carry or ship home. When Chris was eighteen Flo made a down payment on a car for her. A Jaguar.
What she remembered most vividly, however, and missed most painfully, were the letters and phone calls. While Chris was at Princeton, she emailed and called Flo daily. And Aunt Florence replied—consistently. Chris, studying literature, couldn’t believe that her job for four whole years would be reading all the greatest books ever written. She was a straight-A student. She loved books, always had, especially Regency and Victorian romances, from Austen to Brontë. And she loved the inexpensive love stories you could buy at Walmart for $6.99. So did Aunt Florence; they agreed that everyone deserved a six-ninety-nine happy ending. They often discussed the books the way other women discussed their favorite soaps.
They had been so close, the best of friends, confidantes.
Florence had never married—the “old-maid” aunt. Except that Aunt Florence was only fourteen years older than Chris. More like an older sister than an aunt, actually. Five-year-old Chris had sobbed for hours the day Flo left for college; she sat by the front bay window all afternoon awaiting Flo’s first weekend home. Flo was brilliant, sophisticated, fashionable and rich. She was also bossy, fiercely independent, ambitious and stubborn as a mule. Devoted, sometimes controlling. Loads of fun or a pain in the butt, depending. Such was the deal for an aunt and niece who were more like siblings. Flo couldn’t help it that she was the elder.
Chris, her parents and Aunt Florence had always lived on the same street. Flo had kept the old Palmer family home on the upper river drive after her parents—first her father, at the age of seventy-two, then her mother, at sixty-four—died. Flo was only twenty-one then, and Chris vaguely remembered an argument over Flo’s living alone in the big house when she could just as easily move in with Randolph’s family. Flo, predictably, won.
Chris’s mom, Arlene, whom Chris still ached for, was the nurturer of them all. Chris longed to revisit the smells from her early childhood: her father’s cologne, her mother’s cooking and baking, Flo’s furs. Arlene had married Randolph and, she joked, Florence. And indeed, Arlene was like a wife to both of them, representing both Randolph and Flo at charity functions. A society wife—philanthropic, on a number of boards—and caretaker in one. Randolph and Florence had inherited the family business and worked at it. Arlene hadn’t “worked” technically, except that no one ever worked harder at taking care of a family. And that was all the family there was. The Palmers of Chicago. Randolph, Arlene, Florence…and Christine.
Then it happened. Arlene and Randolph. Dead. They were in their forties—too soon. Chris came home from Princeton to help Aunt Flo bury them, to pack up what they wore and wiped their noses with. It had been black and horrid. She didn’t go back to school. What for? For literature?
She met Steve at a nightclub. Steve Zanuck—they called him Stever. Hotshot, arrogant, sexy Stever. He was a few years older than she, and Aunt Florence became instantly bitchy, as if she were jealous of him. As if she didn’t want Chris to be in love. Flo believed he might be no damn good, as she so tactfully put it. Chris, who needed love, assumed that her grieving aunt had turned mean and selfish. Steve had said that Florence was clinging and manipulative. The pot was definitely speaking of the kettle. So Chris slept with him, married him and sued her Aunt Florence, the executor of her parents’ estate, for control of her trust. What had happened? Had she been having an out-of-body experience? Had he drugged her? With sex and flattery. She was so vulnerable and alone she was just a big dope. She had somehow managed to stay asleep for four whole years. Dear God, what an imbecile she’d been.
Trying to emerge from that nightmare had produced some growth and even a little dream or two, like writing, but also immeasurable loneliness. At one time she had had more friends than there seemed time for. The past few years, though, had been largely solitary. Trying to make it on her own, to develop independence and self-reliance, had led to a fundamental absence of people in her life.
She looked at the back of her children’s blond heads; they stared up at the television, transfixed by luxury. Kyle’s toe stuck out of a hole in the foot of his pajamas. And that was all he had now. So, to prevent their being hurt or further deprived, she might have to call Aunt Flo. For them.
She had hoped, somehow, that she could reverse her circumstances. She could never recover her entire lost legacy, but she could be at least a self-supporting single mother, couldn’t she? And so here she was, lying in this bed she had made, because she had to take responsibility for her own mistakes. And because, when Flo was proved right about Stever, her sensitive remark had been, “Well, you just couldn’t listen to me, could you? You had to let that slimeball run through everything Randy left for you before you could even figure it out! Will you ever learn?”
Probably I will learn, Chris thought. Probably I have.
That was why calling Flo was on the very dead-last bottom of her list of possibilities. She loved Flo, she missed her desperately, but she didn’t expect her aunt to be very nice about this.
Of course, she deserved Flo’s anger, her scorn, but…
Perhaps Flo would forgive her? Be somewhat kind?
Perhaps she would hang up, like the landlord’s wife. Or say, “Chris who?”
“Hi, Ma,” Mike yelled as he walked through the living room toward the kitchen. “Ma?”
“Yes, yes, yes,” she called back from the kitchen. “I’m up to my elbows in dough. Come in. Come in.” She pulled her hands out and turned to look up at him. She frowned. “You look hungry. But good.”
He laughed and kissed her forehead. “I weigh one-ninety-five, and I’m not hungry.” He took a cookie from the cookie jar. “Not real hungry, anyway.”
“You must have had a quiet night,” she said softly, quickly looking away from him and back to her kneading. “No bags under the eyes.”
“Not so much as a peep,” he replied, leaning against the cabinet, watching her back. She glanced over her shoulder, and he smiled. Then his shoulders shook. They both knew she had been awake, stayed awake, and they both liked that to some degree. “Where’s Dad?” he asked. But she didn’t have to answer. The toilet flushed, the bathroom door opened, and Mike’s father, a short, muscular and thick, bald-headed Irishman carrying a newspaper, wearing his eyeglasses on his nose and his leather slippers on his feet, came down the hall into the kitchen. His name was also Michael.
“I thought I heard lies being told,” he said. “Mikie, my boy, ‘not a peep’ went by the house at about the witchin’ hour, round ninety-five miles an hour, followed by the second bell.”
“Oh?” Mike’s mother said without turning around. “I didn’t hear it. I sleep like the beloved dead.”
“We went down Forty-second Street, as a matter of fact, four blocks east,” Mike said. “House burned down—one of those little ones over on Belvedere.”
“Everyone okay?” his mother asked, turning around. “And the firemen?”
“Everyone is fine, but as a matter of fact, that’s the reason I stopped by. Last night’s fire. Ma, I’ve gone and done the craziest damn thing; they just might lock me up for a lunatic. The woman who was burned out is a young divorcée with two cute little kids, just three and five years old. They had nowhere to go, and I loaned them my place. Can I sleep over here tonight? Maybe a couple of nights? Until they get settled?”
“Your house?” she asked. She decided
to take her hands out of the dough altogether and wash them. “You gave this family your house?”
“No, Ma, no, I didn’t give it to them. I offered them a place to stay until they can make some plans. See, she’s pretty young, I’d say about Margie’s age, under thirty. And she has no family except the kids. It’s so close to Christmas, and the shelters are—” He stopped. His parents were looking at him as though he’d slipped a gear. At any moment he expected his mother to feel his brow.
He didn’t know how to explain how it made him feel to think of those kids in one of those crappy shelters. Or how it made him feel to think of them in his house. Something peculiar and personal had already attached him to them. Maybe he wouldn’t have done it if the woman, Chris, had been totally unappealing. He briefly considered her appeal; not a bad-looking woman, and feisty. He had gotten snagged on their helplessness, on them, all three of them, even that stupid dog. No way would they get that dog into one of the shelters, and the kids needed the dog. He had no idea what was happening to him.
“Crammed,” he finally said. “The shelters are crammed full.”
“They could stay here,” his mother said.
“No, Ma, no. My place is fine.”
“This divorcée? She’s pretty?”
“Ma, she’s a little short on houses right now, and I’m hardly ever there. Anyway, I’m sure it’ll only be for a few days. Oh,” he said, looking at his dad, “do you have an hour or so you can spare? I need a hand; her car is still over at her house. There’s been an inspection and cleanup crew going through the mess, and they found her purse and keys. Maybe you could drive my car so I can ferry hers back to my place?”
“Sure,” he said slowly, looking over his glasses at his son, maybe considering putting him in a rest home until he became stable again.
“Okay, then.”
“Okay, then,” his parents replied in unison.