A Woman's Place: A Novel (15 page)

He had the gall to grin. "So why are you sore? The judge was right. You should be pleased to have a little time off." The grin did it, made everything roiling inside me roil harder and faster. I felt a powerful, primitive urge to hit him, and though I had the good sense not to do it, I hated him for reducing me to that. With a conscious effort, I relaxed my jaw. I returned to the dresser for sweaters this time. "I'm sore," I said carefully, "because neither that judge nor you have the foggiest notion what parental love is about." I dropped the sweaters into the suitcase, pushing them to fit. "I love my kids. I've done well by them. You two say I haven't. Well, let me tell you"--I straightened and faced him head-on--"this is just the beginning. Page 76

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You want a divorce, I'll give you a divorce, but if you're thinking to use the kids as a bargaining chip to get more money, think again. Drop all this now, before the kids know the worst, before the world knows the worst, and we can reach a comfortable agreement. Keep it up and I'll fight. My lawyer knows what I want. We'll go from court to court, if need be. You can't win, Dennis. Not in the long run. I've been too good a mother, damn it."

"You overrate yourself," he said and turned toward the door. "Johnny has practice at five. Be gone by four."

"What?"

"I want him settled down and ready to play."

"Right after we tell him his world's coming apart? He won't be able to play."

"His world isn't coming apart. It's just changing some. Going to practice will be the best thing for him. The most normal thing."

"Then I'll drop him off."

"No. I will."

"Let me talk with him a little more."

"Do your talking by four. If there's a problem after that, I'll call Mulroy." With a last, long, warning look, he left the room. It was a miracle that my body held together, my inner turmoil was so great. But I had lots to do in a very short time. So I went on automatic.

Not wanting the children to suspect anything amiss before I could explain, I put the suitcases I had lived out of for the past two weeks in the back1 seat of the car. They would know what those were. I filled the trunk with everything I didn't want them to see--older suitcases holding the rest of my clothes, dress bags, and coats. I took the CD

player from the bedroom and a box of CDs, because I couldn't be without music. I took as many pictures of the children as I could without leaving gaping holes on dressers and bookshelves. I took a box containing our checkbook, bank records, and the financial information that I hadn't been able to access on the computer. With fifteen minutes to spare before the school bus passed through, I headed for the kitchen. Within seconds the oven was on, and cookie makings covered the counter. The children loved hot, fresh-from-the-oven cookies, and I loved making them. It was such a mommy thing to do, such a little way of saying I love you in a day and age when gourmet cookies could be bought at every stop. Totally aside from making Kikit-friendly food, I baked whenever I could, particularly before and after trips, when I was feeling guilty about being away.

Yes, guilty. I never left home without qualms.

I wasn't feeling guilty now, but desolate. I wanted the closeness that came with sitting at the table mixing mouthfuls of hot cookie and cold milk. We had been doing that forever, Johnny and I alone in the days before Kikit, then the three of us together. I had been doing it even longer, though those very, very first times seemed so far away. I hadn't thought of them in ages--and didn't know what brought them to mind now. They weren't really the same at all. I had been a child then. Couldn't Page 77

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have been more than ten or eleven. My mother was out working all day and didn't have time to bake, but I knew mothers who did. I had been in their houses. Those houses had been warmer and more inviting than mine. So as soon as the Girl Scout leader showed us how, I made cookies myself. Rona grabbed them and ran, often returning for seconds with friends. By the time my mother came home from work, the cookies were usually gone. I didn't do it often. But I do remember, so clearly, sitting alone in that kitchen, mixing the melty warmth of those things with a glass of cold milk and pretending our lives were safe and secure. I had the first batch in the oven now, had the second on sheets at the ready, and was scrubbing out the mixing bowl when I heard the kids charge through the garage. It was panic time. I pressed the back of my hand to my upper lip, wondering how I was going to keep from crying when I saw them, knowing what had happened in court.

Then the door to the mudroom swung back, and I didn't have time to think about tears or court or the future. I barely had time to wipe my hands and open my arms when Kikit launched herself into them. Exuberant at seeing her, I swooped her up and around. She smelled of little-girl warmth, dried leaves, and chalk.

"Mommeeee! I knew you'd be here when we got home." She squeezed my neck hard enough to pinch nerves, but I didn't care one bit. When Johnny followed her in, I opened an arm and hugged him, too.

"Hi, Mom." The voice was pushed deep, no doubt to compensate for the way he hugged me back. "When'd ya land?"

"A little while ago," I said. It was only a little white lie. I wasn't ready to tell them what I had to yet, wanted to enjoy them a bit, and it was easy, so easy, like this was just another excited homecoming. I held them both back, Kikit with her bottom on the counter and her legs around me, Johnny still within the circle of my arm. "You guys look great." I focused on Kikit. She was the image of health. "Feeling okay?"

"Yup."

"Eating okay?"

"Yup." She opened her mouth wide. "Look at mee I lost a tooth."

"Another tooth?" I admired the spot her tongue was touching. "My goodness, that's a beautiful hole. I take it you do have the tooth?" She would have been in tears otherwise. That was what had happened the last time.

But she was bobbing her head up and down, digging into her pocket, and producing a tiny enamel nugget from a fistful of lint, then telling me everything that she planned to write the tooth fairy in her letter, which had been the solution last time and had so pleased her--how else can the tooth fairy know how special I am--that she had vowed to do it even when she did have the tooth. She was still talking about her letter when Johnny said, "Mikey Rubin broke his arm in the playground today."

"I'm not done," Kikit cried, taking my chin and guiding it back.

"This is more important. It was so gross, Mom."

"Mommy, he's interrupting."

"This is important. There was a bone sticking out from the skin and Page 78

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blood all over. They took him away in an ambulance."

"He was crying," Kikit reported with sudden authority, taking over Johnny's conversation when she couldn't sustain her own. "We could hear it all the way in second grade, but I didn't cry when my tooth came out." She crinkled up her nose and gave a sniff. Her eyes lit up.

"Somethin's in the oven," she sang. "Chocolate chocolate chip," Johnny said to her, then to me, "Mikey wasn't even doing much when it happened. We were playing bombardment against the wall, and he was trying to get away from the ball when he tripped and did this kind of jump and turn and then--wham--there was this awful scream. I mean, the bone was right there, coming out of the skin--"

I muzzled him by dragging him close and said against a thicket of raven-dark hair, "Say that one more time and I'll be sick in the sink. You're making me feel woozy."

"Yeah, I kind of felt like that when I was looking at it," he said when I let him up for air.

"I'll bet lots of your friends did. It's a pretty normal way to feel."

"I want a cookie, Mommy," Kikit said. "Are they almost done?" Two more minutes, and they were, then another two to cool. While we waited, Kikit told me about the turkey that had visited her classroom, the Barbie doll that she had decided she wanted for Christmas, and the note that her teacher had sent home--she had dropped it on the playground, she thought, or maybe on the bus--that said something about white bugs in some kid's hair.

Lice. Swell. I did a quick check, saw nothing, but vowed to tell Dennis to look. See how he liked that.

Johnny wasn't as chatty as Kikit. He didn't hold my hand, or touch my hair or my face, as she did, but he stayed close to my side until I gave the word, then wielded the spatula himself. We were incorrigible

--always rushing this part, peeling off the first of the cookies when they were too hot to hold their shape so that they curled around our fingers instead, but we laughed. We licked melted chocolate from our fingers. We drank milk in a way that left the kind of mustache we saw in the ads, bubbly white smears over toothy grins.

Then Kikit said to the doorway, "Hurry up, Daddy. They're nearly gone." I wanted to chase him away, wanted to cherish these final moments of innocence. It felt so good, so safe, so normal to laugh over cookies and milk.

But the look he gave me was sobering, expectant, in a sharp-focused way. Johnny jumped up from the table and retrieved his backpack from the mudroom. He was passing back through the kitchen enroute to the hall when he asked, "What's for supper?"

I wasn't making supper. I was supposed to pack up my things, visit with the children, and leave by four. If I didn't, Dennis would have the cops usher me out. In front of the children.

Unless he realized how much the kids had missed me and was having second thoughts. Unless he was wondering if there wasn't a better way to do this. Unless he was thinking that he didn't know what in the hell was for dinner and that it would be easier to simply let me stay a while. Page 79

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Answering Johnny, I said, "You'll have to ask your dad what's for supper."

Johnny was frowning at me from the door. "You always make something special when you've been gone. I want lasagna."

"Fried chicken," Kikit chirped. She was doing a little hip-hop, with her elbows on the table and her knees on the chair.

"We had fried chicken last time Mom came home. It's my turn. Lasagna."

"How about pizza," Dennis said.

Kikit crinkled her nose, in distaste this time. "We had that last night with Grandma and Grandpa. Besides, Mommy's making supper." "No," Dennis said. "She's not."

It was a minute before that registered. Kikit stopped dancing. Her eyes grew round. She looked from Dennis to me and back, then sucked in a breath and her elbows, and said with hushed excitement, "Are we celebrating something?"

I waited for Dennis to answer her, but all he did, the yellow-bellied coward, was to hitch his chin my way. The children's eyes followed. I let out a breath. "No celebration. Just talk. Come sit, Johnny." He didn't move. "Is it Grandma?"

I gave him a sad smile--such a sweet, sober, intuitive child--and shook my head. "Not Grandma. Us." There wasn't an easy way to say it. I had tested dozens of words in the time between last Thursday and now. No combination was good. Simpler seemed better. "Your dad and I are separating."

"What does that mean?" Kikit asked.

I gave Dennis a look that asked him to explain, but he stood with his hands on his hips and seemed as curious to hear what I was going to say as Kikit. Apparently he wasn't there to help. He was supervising. He didn't want to do the dirty work himself, but he wanted it done his way. He must have felt that the court had given him that right. Well, it hadn't. If I wanted to tell the children that their father was an insecure SOB who was lacking in loyalty, compassion, and common sense, I would. Neither the court nor Dennis dictated my words. Love did. Worry did. Self-respect did.

"Separating means that we'll be living apart from each other," I said. Kikit took that in stride. "In separate houses?"

"Yes."

"But you can't," she stated. "You're our parents. You have to be with us." "We will be. Just in different places."

"But can't be two places at once."

"You won't. You'll be with Daddy some of the time and me the rest."

"Isn't that what we do already?"

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Well, it was. She was absolutely right. But only to a point. "What we've been doing is having overlapping lives. Sometimes all four of us are here, other times just three. From now on it'll be three-either you and Johnny and me, or you and Johnny and Daddy. Daddy and I won't be here with you guys at the same time."

"Why not?" she demanded.

I turned to Dennis again, hoping he would take a stab at that one, but he was looking blank--no help in the answer department. Not that I blamed him this time. Saying the right thing was crucial. The wrong words could cause permanent damage.

Only I didn't know the right words. So I fell back on the age-old,

"Because we think it's best."

"Well, I don't," Kikit insisted. "Who'll live where, and where'll we live?"

"You'll live here. I'll have another place."

"Where?"

"I don't know yet. But you can be with me there or be with me here."

"I want you here all the time. Why can't you live in the den upstairs?

I'll clear all my babies out. You like the sofa bed, you told me you did."

It was Johnny, plastered to the wall just inside the kitchen, who said,

"They don't want to live in the same house with each other. They don't like each other anymore."

I left the table and went to him. His body was stiff, his eyes sunken. It was like he was trying his best not to collapse inward but was losing the battle. I slipped my arm around his shoulders, no easy I 4 I feat given that outer rigidity, and said, "There's more to it than that. I'm not sure even I understand it myself. It's pretty complicated."

"Tell me. I wanna know!" Kikit cried, but I continued talking to Johnny, jiggling his shoulders in an attempt to loosen him up.

"The one thing you have to remember--the only really important thing--is that we both love you and Kikit."

"But you don't love each other," he said. Four days before, I would have argued. Now? "I don't know. This is kind of a trial period. We'll be doing lots of thinking and talking." I didn't want to mention Dean Jenovitz or, worse, the court order against me. In time, the children would know about Jenovitz, since he had to meet with them. I hoped they would never have to know about the court order.