Blame: A Novel (36 page)

Patsy let a few moments pass. How come you never told me any of this? she asked again, quietly.

Water under the bridge, Patsy. All a long time ago.

Patsy was silenced by competing urges: to drop the subject, as Cal clearly wanted; to argue that it was only a long time ago
now
and she should have been told about Millicent Hawthorne much earlier; or to introduce herself into the history. What about me? Where do I stand in all of this? How do I fit into the picture? But she was a little afraid of what Cal might say.

All the more reason I owe my kids amends, Cal went on quietly. For years I put my own needs first. The least I can do is help them out now, when they’re having a tough time of it.

Except March isn’t a little child anymore, said Patsy, relieved to return
to that familiar topic. She’s an adult with a lazy husband. You’re not helping them by giving them a free pass.

Forrest is lazy, said Cal. But whatever else you can say about March, she pulls her weight. She does what’s expected of her, and more. She’s a marvelous mom. Why should she and the kids suffer for her husband’s character defects?

She is a good mother, said Patsy. But she also wants to live above her means, in my house, at my expense.

Cal’s eyes narrowed, and he started to speak.

I mean, my emotional expense, Patsy added quickly. Here I am, trying to adjust to a whole new set of facts about my life. I desperately need privacy and refuge, and every time I turn around, there they are.

But the kids have always come home before. Cal seemed genuinely baffled. Stan. And his ex, what’s her name? It’s always worked out. Anyway, you’re going to Cambridge soon enough.

Not till fall! Patsy said, putting down her silverware. And
we’re
going to Cambridge, remember? You’re coming too.

I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that, Patsy. I know you want me to come, and I promised to. But I can’t. I can’t face the plane ride, or being gone so long, or the thought of being holed up in a British flat while you work.

Only a couple hours a day. The rest of the time, we’ll sightsee. I’ve wanted this for years. We have theater tickets.

And you should go. You will go.

I’m not leaving you at the Ponderosa by yourself, she said.

But you see, I won’t be alone. The kids . . .

Oh, she said, and kept her voice low. I do see. I see what you and March have been up to all along.

There’s no conspiracy, Patsy. There’s just the way things worked out.

Patsy made an effort to match his calm. If she grew shrill or angry, he’d revert to his distant, tolerant sponsorial mode. As she steadied herself, an elderly couple appeared at the end of their table. White-haired, frail, in pale clothes, they were the Evanses, who had lived across the street from the Tudor. Their kids had grown up with Cal’s, but Patsy had never gotten to know them. Cal, Cal Sharp, they said with a chime of surprise, as if they’d never dreamed of seeing him again.

Barbara! Ed! Cal answered, half rising from the booth to clap their shoulders, clasp their hands.

The names and jobs and whereabouts of all their children were recited in turn, the number of grandchildren totaled and then revised.

Finally, leaning on each other’s arm, the Evanses tottered off, two shrinking old people with the same color hair and clothes, the same hunch to their shoulders—a matched set.

Cal watched them go with a smile that grew sad. Patsy waited until silence and a sense of seclusion returned to their booth.

So tell me, Cal. What if March hadn’t moved back? she said coolly. Would you have come to England then?

A quick shake of his head. Stan said he’d move in if need be. Or I would’ve made do with Haydee. And Bob, of course. So I had other options, yes.

Patsy pulsed with anger and powerlessness. Yet even as she seethed, the thought of going to England alone, at this point, was almost a relief.

•

Cal must have spoken to March because after the dinner at the Trestle, the family’s presence in the house seemed to recede. March wasn’t in the kitchen as often; she moved Beckett’s jump seat into their room. In the afternoons, Patsy saw March and the children up by the barn, feeding Diotima and Mamie oat grass that had sprouted where hayseeds scattered. Or March nursed Beckett on a bench while Ava poked around with a stick, sometimes getting a few good jabs into Mamie before March noticed.

Patsy made herself a cup of tea one afternoon and, since the coast was clear, drank it in the garden room and looked through the paper. Sunflowers now peered in the north-facing windows and clashed with long canes of pink roses, the Gertrude Jekylls. She couldn’t remember when she’d last sat there.

Forrest came into the kitchen and, seeing her, paused—he too must have been coached to give her a wide berth—but she put down the paper and greeted him. There’s hot water, if you want tea or coffee.

No thanks, he said, and poured himself a glass of milk. After drinking it half down, he came toward her. I don’t want to interrupt you, he said. But I want to say how much we appreciate staying here. I know it’s not easy to have two little kids and us . . .

I don’t imagine it’s what you want either, she said. I’m sure you’d rather be in your own place.

He gazed into his milk. Yeah, just I gotta get this thing I’m trying to do—he half shrugged, half gestured toward the dining room—off the ground.

•

Benny’s office was now in downtown Pasadena, in a pretty stone building where his name was on a bronze plaque sunk into an ivy-covered wall. Patsy took an elevator to the seventh floor, and in the tiny, three-chair waiting room she checked in with the receptionist and helped herself to a butterscotch candy. A very good one, sweet and salty.

Benny had gone gray. Never tall, he now stooped, and Patsy, as she shook his hand, felt as if she towered. He led her into his office overlooking the rooftops of downtown, took her folder of papers.

Ricky Barrett had already filled him in, Benny said. Closing his office door, he sat behind his desk. I find this all very upsetting, he went on. I keep thinking there was something else I should’ve done, back when it happened. Something that would have kept you out of prison.

What else could you have done?

I went back over my notes, he said, and the first time I talked to you at the sheriff’s station, you were pretty drunk and incoherent, but in retrospect, a couple of things stood out. You kept asking why
you’d
been arrested. You also repeatedly said, Where’s the fucking crutch seller?

The what?

Isn’t that our man—didn’t Hogue sell medical equipment?

Oh, said Patsy.

I didn’t put it together, said Benny. I thought the crutch-seller business was some oblique reference to the victims. It didn’t occur to me that there was another person in the car, let alone a different driver.

It didn’t occur to anyone, said Patsy.

Benny picked up a pen and started tapping bullet points on a scratch pad. I’ll put a motion together. I’ll need a declaration from the Simms woman like the one you got from Robinson. Expert opinions couldn’t hurt.

But wouldn’t I still be an accessory? Patsy had to ask. A woman I knew at fire camp was in the car when her john, some guy she’d met minutes before, robbed a 7-Eleven, and she got more time than he did.

That’s different, Benny said. All that means is the guy pled out at her expense. Not comparable. Yours was all about your driving. Chances
are, if Hogue hadn’t left the scene, if he’d told his story and didn’t have a record, nobody would have been prosecuted.

So I was prosecuted for what, exactly? Having an accident on a suspended license?

Pretty much, said Benny. They couldn’t get you for intoxication, so they took what they could.

The rooftops of Old Pasadena were a study of vent pipes and airconditioning cowlings, odd hutlike assemblages on tar paper, erected without the least regard for appearance. Off in one corner, she saw the squat, onion-domed turrets of the Bellwood Hotel, now the Bellwood Luxury Condominiums.

Patsy said, Do you think it’s worth going through all this rigmarole when I’ve already served the time?

It depends on how you feel about the public record, said Benny. It’s really up to you.

The quarter was flying by. Her students camped out in the hallway outside her office to discuss their midterm projects, then delivered them in class, one wearing an eye patch as James Joyce, another wrapped in green cellophane to be the light on Gatsby’s pier. The job talks by the comp lit finalists were delivered the second week of May: Aimee Song spoke on “Han: Intergenerational Grief, The Postwar Short Story in South Korea”; Fernando Molina on “The Language of Cartoon and Carnival in Asturias’s Mulata de tal”; Lewis Fletcher on “Exiled to the Country House: Provincial Life and Suffering in French and Russian Fiction.”

Patsy did not attend.

•

They’re still there? said Audrey. Haven’t you sent them packing? Did you try the big fat check?

Cal wants them here so he won’t have to go to Cambridge with me. That’s what this is really about.

I’m not surprised, she said. What would Cal do in Cambridge, anyway?

Same thing he does here. Watch TV. Talk to his kids on the phone. Go to British AA. I’m only going to work a couple of hours a day. We’d go out. Besides, he said he’d come. That’s why I rented such a big flat.

Do you need him there?

I can’t just leave him alone, Audrey. He’s almost eighty!

Let March and her dot-com fellow take over for a while. And you, go. Get out, live your life.

I don’t know, Patsy said. I’d feel derelict leaving him.

A silence ensued in which Patsy imagined Audrey sitting in her white-painted wood-paneled living room overlooking the Seine, the Pont Neuf, and the pointy tip of Île de la Cité, while nearby, on the gilded-armed Louis Quinze chairs, her housemate’s Pomeranians curled like cushions.

Patsy said, By the way, did you know Cal had an affair with Millicent Hawthorne?

A pause. I did know that.

How come you never told me?

Cal asked me not to. The daughter was over there all the time—he didn’t want it to go any further. Besides, what difference would it make?

I don’t know, said Patsy. But some.

Well, I’m sorry. I was hamstrung. If it’s any consolation, I didn’t tell Gilles either.

You always said Peggy was his big love.

She was, at first, and he wanted to help her with all her problems. But Millicent was his great friend. He was never so easy and happy as he was with Millicent. They were two of a kind.

So why didn’t they just divorce and marry each other?

Audrey sighed. Kids, houses, alimony, inertia, Cal trying to do the right thing. Though who knows what would’ve happened if Millie had gone to the doctor when she first found the lump instead of waiting three years hoping it would just go away.

•

Bob the boarder had taken to heating frozen pizzas in the possum trot kitchen at odd hours and avoiding mealtimes altogether. Ava sniffed him out and demanded slices; they were discovered one afternoon sharing a pepperoni-and-mushroom pie. March rewarded Bob with a nutrition lecture he described to Patsy as
Das Vegetal
.

She expected another such story when Bob knocked on her home office door, then closed it quietly behind him. I just wanted you to know I gave Cal notice today, he said. I’m leaving June first.

Oh! I’m sorry, she said. But not surprised.

He was renting an apartment in downtown Pasadena with another sober guy. But don’t worry, he said. I’ll still take Cal to meetings whenever he wants.

She tried to talk Bob into the possum trot. His friend could live there too; it wouldn’t cost them much. You wouldn’t have to deal with
her
, said Patsy.

Cal suggested that too, Bob said. But I like the idea of living in town, walking to bookstores, the movies, meetings.

Of course, Patsy said. This is sort of the boonies.

I loved living here. You and Cal have been great.

Patsy said, I’m sad to see you go.

Upon reflection, she wasn’t sad so much as annoyed that he could pick up and leave, just like that.

•

Sarah said, You just have to find March a house. You find her a house she wants, slip her the down payment, she’ll be out of your hair in a second.

Patsy wasn’t sure she had a down payment to slip anyone, and for one seditious moment she wished she’d kept more of her own money over the years. But if March asked him for a house, Cal might have a hard time refusing her. He had a hard time refusing her anything else.

And another thing, Sarah went on. Comp lit offered that job to the Korean woman, but apparently she’s had a better offer from Michigan.

•

On two successive Sundays, Patsy drove up to Altadena looking at
FOR SALE
signs. She took Brice along for company and opinions.

They toured homes that echoed the aesthetics Patsy recalled from March’s trim, modern Sunnyvale home. Then, because they were close by, Brice showed her a tiny hermit’s cabin across the stream from his place. And because they liked the snapshot in the newspaper, they looked at a small, thick-walled adobe overlooking the arroyo.

The next Sunday, Patsy wanted to look at the adobe a second time. In a sunny spot on the property, she flung open her arms. This is where I’d put the orchard.

Brice, sunglasses sagging at the neck of his T-shirt, hands lightly on his hips, glanced all around at the trees, the fence, the back patio. His assessing gaze landed on her. So what’s really on your mind here, Pats, he asked. You leaving the old guy, or what?

His directness drew her up short. Didn’t he know that this vague,
unfocused home search was the closest she could come to addressing that question?

The next open house they visited was a clean three-bedroom mid-century home with a glittering pool. The wood floors needed to be sanded, and ivy had taken over too much of the backyard, but the price was about half of what the same place would cost in La Cañada Flintridge. Patsy took a flyer.

She found Cal reading the Sunday paper in his office. Why hello, darling. She kissed his dry cheek.