Finding Home (4 page)

There
was genuine distress on his face. “Look, we could still go out.”

Because he felt bad, she forgave him. And put him first the way she always did, especially when her defenses had been dismantled.

“You look exhausted, honey, and this is Friday night. If we go out now, we'll only wind up waiting hours for a table.” But it wasn't too late to have a romantic dinner at home. The way she'd originally planned. She caught her lower lip between her teeth, then asked, “How do you feel about cold beef stroganoff?”

“Beef stroganoff?” When his eyes widened like that, he looked almost boyish. God help her, she felt her pulse quicken. He could still excite her the way nothing and no one else could, after all these years. “You made beef stroganoff? That's my favorite.”

Affection grew within her. “Yes, Brad, I know. That's why I made it.” She led the way through the dining room into the kitchen. “I kept it on the warming tray. I'm afraid it's beginning to resemble congealed butterscotch pudding.” Stacey opened the refrigerator where she'd placed the serving dish. After edging it out, she picked the dish up with both hands and set it down on the counter. “I could put it in the microwave,” she offered.

He nodded, reminding her of an eager little boy. Of Jim when he'd been little, ready to agree to anything in order to get what he wanted.

“Sounds great.”

“It won't taste as good,” she warned him. “Nothing out of a microwave except for popcorn ever tastes as good as it's supposed to.” She debated her next move. “Maybe I'll heat it up on the stove. It'll take longer, but it'll taste better.” He hadn't said anything. “Unless you're starving,” she qualified, waiting for him to tip the scales one way or another.

He followed her as she moved toward the stove, his eye on the prize, the dish with his dinner in it.

“I am,” he told her, then made the supreme sacrifice. “But I can wait.”

All right, she'd give him points. He was trying. Guilt did that to a man sometimes. Made him easier to work with. And right now, she wasn't above using that guilt to her advantage.

Once she moved the serving dish right next to a front burner, she took a pot out of the lower cupboard and spooned in two servings of stroganoff, then added one more for good measure in case Brad was really ravenous. The linguine stood in the bowl where she'd placed it earlier. Stacey dumped that into another pot, poured water over it and set it on the burner beside the stroganoff.

“Five minutes for the linguine, ten for the stroganoff,” she announced. Then, taking a chilled bottle of wine out of the refrigerator, she poured some into a long-stemmed glass and handed it to him. “You can have this while you're waiting.”

“You're a life saver.” He murmured the words to her back as she filled a second glass for herself. Brad took a long sip
and let the red liquid pour itself through his veins. For a moment, his eyes had fluttered shut. “God, that feels good.”

Stacey felt a slight pinch in the pit of her stomach. There was a time when Brad had said that after they had finished making love.

To her “good” was a paltry word, hardly fit to describe their lovemaking. Though never frequent because of the demands of his work, when they had occurred, the sessions had been nothing short of spectacular. He'd always teased her that it was quality, not quantity that counted, and he'd certainly made a true believer out of her. At least, until the occasions grew fewer and fewer, moving further apart until eventually, it felt as if she was faced with neither quantity nor quality.

Stacey offered him a smile that involved mostly her lips and not her heart. And was then surprised when Brad touched his half-empty glass to her full one.

“To another twenty-five years,” he said before taking another sip.

Her heart twisted a little. “Twenty-six,” she corrected.

“Twenty-six?” he repeated, furrowing his brow. “Has it been that long?” He tried to think back to the actual year. For a second, nothing came to him. He drew a blank. “Are you sure?”

Did he actually think she didn't remember when they had gotten married? That he'd forgotten cut her to the quick. It was all she could do to keep the hurt from registering on her face.

“I'm sure,” she answered with a cheerfulness that rang hollow to her own ear. “Time flies when you're having fun.”

He knew her inside and out and he knew that hurt tone. He couldn't fault her, he supposed. But by now, he would
have thought that she understood. She shouldn't need the outward trappings, the constant assurances. Shouldn't she just know that he loved her without wanting to be shown, without having him jump through hoops all the time?

Weren't women ever satisfied?

He sought what little patience his day had left him. “Stacey—”

“I'll get dinner,” Stacey told him, cutting him off as she turned away. That was his I'm-lecturing-even-though-I-don't-consider-this-a-lecture tone. She didn't want to hear it. The way she felt right now, she wasn't sure if she could hold her tongue, and once things were said, they couldn't be unsaid.

 

“You know, I think I like stroganoff better after it's been warmed up once,” Brad told her a few minutes later as they sat at the dining room table.

Stacey looked at him over the unlit candles. She'd begun to light them once she'd brought his dish to the table, only to have him stop her. There was no reason to light candles, he'd told her. After all, the power hadn't gone out.

But it has,
she thought now as she watched him eat.
It's gone out of our marriage, Brad. You just can't see it.

“Good,” he murmured, raising his fork as if in tribute. “After all these years, you haven't lost your touch.”

How would you know?
she wondered as she nodded in response with a half smile. Try as she might to connect a date, an event, to the last time that they had touched each other, she found that nothing came to mind. It had been so long, she couldn't remember when.

But that was going to change tonight, she promised herself.

 

They went to bed shortly after ten, after narrowly avoiding getting into a heated argument about Jim. She'd mentioned that he hadn't said anything about Jim not being around, and he'd responded by saying that he was savoring the quiet. It made her feel that he was happy to be rid of their son. The fact that they were so far apart in their feelings about Jim bothered her to the very depths of her soul.

She would have loved to have resolved something, but that wasn't going to happen. She'd finally tabled the discussion when it looked to be in danger of escalating into a full-blown argument. She desperately didn't want to argue on their anniversary, even though she felt that Brad was just as wrong in his attitude toward Jim as Jim was in his attitude toward his father.

As Brad got into bed, she quickly slipped into the bathroom and put on the sexy black nightgown she'd bought earlier in the week. Running a comb through her hair, she checked over her makeup, opting to leave it on tonight rather than run the risk of looking like someone who'd fallen into the river and been dragged out, pale and ghastly.

When she came out less than five minutes later, Brad already looked on the verge of falling asleep. She purposely jostled the bed as she got in.

His eyes opened. Good.

Curling up beside him, she ran her hand slowly along the ridges of his chest.

“You still have pretty decent pectorals,” she commented with a smile. Slowly, she strummed her fingers along the outline of his muscles. Brad was blessed with good genes, she
thought, genes that allowed him to retain the physique he'd worked to create more than two decades ago. He still had a membership to the gym, but by his own admission, he had no idea where the card was any longer, or when he'd been to the gym last.

Brad shifted. When she continued running her hand along his chest, he covered it with his own. And then moved it aside.

“Stacey, don't.”

Instantly, she could feel herself stiffening inside. But she refused to believe that he was saying what she thought he was saying.

Still, her throat felt tight as she asked, “Don't what?”

He looked at her and frowned reprovingly. By now, she should have known better. Wasn't a wife supposed to be able to read the signs?

“Don't start.”

God, but she hated the way he made her feel. Like a lowly supplicant, begging for a crumb of affection. Stacey sat up and looked at him. “Start what?”

Brad seemed more weary than annoyed. “You know what I'm talking about, Stacey. You're starting in and I'm tired tonight.”

Starting in.
Like making love with her was some kind of a hardship for him that he was forced to endure out of a sense of duty. She couldn't keep the note of bitterness out of her voice, even though she fought it. “Why should tonight be any different?”

He covered his eyes with his hand, like someone gathering what little strength he had left. “Don't do the guilt thing, Stacey. I was on my feet for four hours, trying to save this kid's legs.”

“And did you?”

The question surprised him. “I think so.”

“Good.” And she meant that. Because she was proud of him, proud of the fact that he helped people. But that didn't mean she didn't want something for herself, too. “So how about trying to save our marriage?”

“Our marriage doesn't need saving,” he told her with a dismissive air, as if she was babbling nonsense. “And it doesn't depend on sex.”

“Thank God for that,” she quipped, “because if it did, it would have died a long time ago.”

This was old ground. They'd danced over it before. He saw no reason to rehash anything tonight. He had no desire to get into an argument on their anniversary.

“You get it often enough,” he assured her. He tugged the sheet up over him, rolling over as he closed his eyes. “I'll owe you,” he told her. “I'm good for it.”

“You know, if I ever decide to collect on that, you're going to be making love to me for at least six months straight.”

“I look forward to it,” Brad murmured. He was already drifting off to sleep.

“That makes two of us,” Stacey answered.

But she was talking to herself and she knew it. With a sigh, she leaned over, switching off the lamp. And then watched as the darkness swallowed up the room with one bite.

“Here.”

Coming up behind her at the kitchen counter the following Monday morning, Brad placed two hundred-dollar bills next to her mug of coffee.

Lost in thought, she hadn't even heard him walk into the room. Stacey turned from the counter, his breakfast—four scrambled egg whites and one slice of wheat toast, no butter—on the plate she was holding. She set it down before him.

“What's this?” she asked.

Brad picked up the newspaper and gave her an amused look. “I know that you like doing everything by credit card or check, but I thought you could still recognize money when you saw it.”

Taking her coffee mug and leaving the bills where they were, Stacey sat down opposite her husband. She hated it when Brad got flippant. It always felt as if he was talking down to her.

She supposed that she was being overly sensitive, a holdover from her hurt feelings. Ordinarily, she didn't allow things to fester, but Brad had been gone most of the weekend, attending a local conference. This was supposed to have been their weekend.

It took everything she had to bank down the frown that wanted to possess her lips. “I know it's money, Brad. What was it doing next to my coffee mug?”

Brad moved his broad shoulders in a dismissive half shrug, uncomfortable with having to explain himself. He wasn't a man of words. Didn't she understand that? “I just thought you might want to go buy yourself something.”

Stacey stared at him, speechless. Dear God, when had this man gotten rooted in the fifties? Did he suddenly forget they had a joint checking account?

She took a long sip of the black coffee, letting the caffeine jolt through her system before commenting. Very carefully, she set the mug down before her, then curved her hands around it. She had this sudden need to anchor herself to something.

Stacey raised her eyes to his. “If I wanted to go buy myself ‘something,' Brad, I would,” she informed him evenly. “I have all those credit cards and checks you just referred to a minute ago.
And—
” she underscored the word because it was important to her that she was earning her own way, that he didn't think of her as just so much dead weight he was carrying “—I earn a pretty decent salary, so if I did buy myself ‘something,' I wouldn't feel as if I was dipping into ‘your' money.”

Brad's brow furrowed. He looked at her as if she'd just lapsed into a foreign language, one he was trying desperately to decode.

“Don't be ridiculous.” He jabbed at his eggs with his fork as if he expected resistance from that quarter as well. “It's our money.”

Right. Until I want to do something with it.
This morning, as she turned on the kitchen faucet, she could hear the toilet flush. Since there was no one in the house but the two of
them and there was no resident ghost to speak of, that meant the water pressure was weak in the third bathroom. Something else that could be addressed if they renovated the house.

Stacey seized the term he used, cornering him. At least for a second. “If it's ‘our' money, why can't I use it to renovate ‘our' house.”

Finished with his eggs, Brad took a bite of his toast. He'd always been a compartmental eater, Stacey thought as she watched him.

“We've been over this, Stacey,” he told her wearily. “It's not a wise move.”

She was willing to admit that she was the one who liked to dream, to make plans that weren't always rooted in cold, hard reality and that he grounded her by being the logical one. It was what made them a good team, she'd once thought. But somewhere along the line, it felt as if their team had become a dictatorship, with Brad in the role of Il Duce. She was getting so damn tired of his practicality, his bare-bones approach to things.

It was all she could do not to roll her eyes as she listened to him.

“I don't want to be wise, Brad, I want new cabinets. I want drains that don't stop up and I want bathrooms that don't look as if they were left over from the set of
Leave It to Beaver
.”

The toast eaten, Brad pushed back his plate, struggling with annoyance.

“You're exaggerating again, Stacey.” Looking past her shoulder, he saw that the money was still lying on the counter. She hadn't put it in her pocket the way he thought she would. “Look, all I wanted to do was make up for forgetting your an
niversary.” The second the words were out, he realized his mistake and was quick to correct it. “I mean
our
anniversary.”

There, he'd said it in a nutshell, she thought. Her anniversary. Like he had phoned in his response to the priest when they'd taken their vows. Like it didn't mean anything to him. The urge to cry was almost overwhelming.

“By throwing money at me?” Her voice cracked at the end of the question.

“I didn't throw it.” Irritated, he pointed toward the money. “I placed it on the counter.”

She glanced over her shoulder at the two bills. He just didn't get it, did he? Although she knew it was an exercise in futility, tantamount to banging her head against the wall, she tried to explain it to him, anyway.

“Brad, I can buy myself anything I want. That's not the point.” When he made no response, she knew that he had no idea what the point was. So she spelled it out for him. “The point is you actually taking the time to buy something for me.”

He blew out a breath in disgust. “I'm not any good at that. You're hard to shop for.”

Her eyes widened in complete mystification. She'd never made a secret of anything she liked. And she liked a broad spectrum of things. It was hard to find something she
didn't
like.

“Hard to shop for?” Stacey echoed, stunned. “I'd accept anything you bought—as long as you thought I might like it.”

“That's just it,” he declared as if she'd made his point for him. “I have no idea what you'd like.”

Sadness swiped through her like a rusted sword. “You used to.” Her mouth curved as a cherished memory whispered to her from across the pages of time. “I still have the trivia book
you bought me for no reason that time we were browsing in the used bookstore.”

She saw by his expression that he had absolutely no recollection of what she was referring to. She took a stab at rousing his memory. “We'd just started going together. You were looking for used textbooks to buy for your anatomy class and the trivia book was misplaced. You didn't have much money to spare, but you bought it for me. Because you knew I loved trivia.” He was nodding. Was that just to put her off or because he finally remembered? “I cried when you gave it to me.”

And then the light really did dawn on him. “Oh. Right.” He was nodding with feeling now. “I remember you crying.” Remembered because it had embarrassed him and he didn't know how to get her to stop. “I thought I did something wrong.”

She laughed softly. She supposed in some ways he had always been clueless.

“No, you did something right. Something very right.” She searched Brad's face for a sign that she'd managed to get through to him and finally asked, “Do you understand what I'm saying?”

He took a shot at it. “That you want another trivia book?”

Men had to be the most frustrating creatures on the face of the earth. “No, I want you to stop and think. About me. About us.”

In a general way, he knew what she was after. And it was foolish. “Stacey, you're not a twenty-year-old girl anymore, you're forty-seven, and I'm not a twenty-one-year-old premed student doing his damnedest to score points with you—”

“Maybe that's the problem,” she cut in. “Maybe you should be.”

She'd lost him. “Be what? A twenty-one-year-old premed student?”

“No, doing your damnedest to score points with me.”

“Why?” he demanded, looking at her as if she'd lost her mind. “We're married.” And then he sighed. “That didn't come out right.”

“No,” she agreed. “It didn't. Did you ever consider that maybe I'd like to feel special? That I still mattered to you?”

“Of course you still matter,” he retorted, his temper fraying. “I'm still here, aren't I? Do you have any idea how many of the doctors who I work with have gotten a divorce?”

Was that supposed to make her feel better? That he hadn't divorced her? Why did he always focus on the negative instead of the positive? Was it his profession that made him this way, or had he always been like this? She no longer knew. She just knew that she was unhappy and she didn't want to be.

She shook her head, fighting another wave of sadness. “You wouldn't be able to find the time to get a divorce,” she replied quietly.

He gave it one last try. “Stacey, we've been married for twenty-five years.”

“Twenty-six,” she corrected again, her teeth clenched to keep from shouting. “We've been married twenty-six years.”

He huffed impatiently. “Twenty-six, twenty-five, the point is, we've been married for a long time. I'm not about to start pretending that we're still dating. That's juvenile.”

It felt as if he'd just slapped her. “I'm being juvenile?”

He neither denied nor verified. He just built on what he'd said. “Maybe that's why you related so well to Jim. He refuses to grow up, too.”

The phone rang, the sound wedging its way between them. Stacey ignored it. She was in the middle of an argument and all that mattered to her was getting Brad to understand how much his words, his actions, or lack thereof, hurt her. “Don't drag Jim into this, Brad. This is between you and me.”

He looked toward the telephone. “Aren't you going to answer that?”

“No,” she said flatly. “Not until you answer me.”

Brad threw up his hands. “I can't talk to you when you're like this,” he snapped, rising. The phone rang again as he crossed to it.

They weren't through yet. For once, she wanted a resolution instead of letting things just remain tangled until they faded away. “Whoever it is can leave a message.”

“It might be a patient, trying to reach me.”

Stacey got up, following him. “
I'm
trying to reach you,” she insisted.

But Brad was already picking up the receiver.

“Hello? What? Yes, this is Dr. Sommers. Could you repeat that, please?”

She sighed. Work had pulled him away from her again. Crossing back to the table, she picked up her mug and carried it to the sink. She was about to turn on the water to rinse the mug out when Brad held out the receiver to her. She looked at him quizzically.

“It's for you.” His expression was grim.