Hush Little Baby (4 page)
An hour and a half later, my phone buzzes. Caller ID says it’s Melissa Williams, Drew’s room mom. My first instinct is to ignore it.
No, I can’t make cupcakes for the bake sale.
No, I’m not available for the field trip.
No, I don’t want to be a part of the PTA.
On the fourth ring, I answer.
“Hi, Jillian, it’s Melissa. How are you?”
Not as chipper as you.
“Fine.”
“I’m calling because I’m concerned about Drew.”
I don’t even know the name of her son, nor do I have the slightest concern about him.
“This is the third time this month he’s come to school without lunch.”
Shame blindsides my irritation as the brown bag sitting on the counter at home etches into my brain. I close my eyes and bite my lip.
The door to the inner sanctum of the doctor’s office opens. “Jillian, we’re ready for you,” the nurse says at the exact moment Melissa says, “Jillian, are you there?”
As I stand to follow the nurse, my laptop slips and I juggle the phone, and when I recover, the phone is off. I just hung up on Melissa. I power it on to call her back, but the nurse stops me and points to the sign, “No Cell Phones.”
Drew has no lunch.
“So you might be pregnant,” the nurse says, scanning my updated medical questionnaire and smiling. “Congratulations.”
* * *
On the way back to the office, I stop at the drugstore and buy a box of Next Choice, irrationally scanning the store for Gordon as if he might be watching. I swallow the pill in the restroom and dispose of the evidence. It’s still too early to know whether or not I’m pregnant, and if I wait, it will be too late.
I can’t handle what I have.
I
look at my family in the sterling-silver frame on my desk—we’re at an Angels’ game. Addie wears a sunhat with daisies, and her smile fills her face. Drew has on a blue cap with an A embroidered on the front and holds up a giant foam hand with the finger extended that says, “Go Angels!” Gordon’s arm is around my shoulders, and I look happy.
I put my head on my folded arms on my desk.
Addie crying without a good-bye.
I feel bad.
Drew, no lunch.
I feel bad.
Gordon. Jeffrey.
I feel bad. I feel bad. I feel bad. The chorus beats with my heart.
“Mr. Harris would like to see you in the cafeteria.”
I wake myself to look at Tina, who stands expressionless in the doorway, and make a mental note:
Tina is a brilliant liar.
Her flat, expressionless features betray nothing as she invites me to my birthday glorification.
* * *
“SURPRISE!”
Fifty forced smiles face me, and I force a grin back as a few risk glances at their watches. A bouquet of balloons floats from the center table, the inflated “40” rising above the other rainbow orbs.
“Thank you, you really shouldn’t have.”
They really, really shouldn’t have.
“But since you did, and since the cake looks delicious, let’s celebrate my old age. Dig in.”
The group breaks into the smaller groups of the office—the twenty- and thirty-something singlettes, the future up-and-comers, the over-the-hill, just-trying-to-maintain-status-quos, and the power brokers who are already making their way toward the door. The cake is dissected and passed around, and a few more watch-glancers stealthily slip out the door.
Tina walks up, her dark bob bobbing, and hands me a piece of white-frosted yellow cake with red filling.
“Thank you,” I say, wondering how long I have to endure the tribute before I, too, can slip away.
“Would you like a drink?” Tina asks.
A stiff one.
Saying that to Tina would almost certainly cause the girl’s fine-teased brows to furrow, and then she’d probably spend the next hour searching for a way to stiffen my fruit punch. Sarcasm and humor are lost on her. “No thank you,” I answer instead.
“I sure could use one,” the familiar baritone of Bronson Harris interrupts from behind us, “a double, dry, straight up.”
He kisses my cheek as Tina and her furrowed brow scurry off with a “Yes, sir,” in search of a solution to her new crisis of making a double-dry-straight-up fruit punch for the big guy.
“I hear congratulations are in order. You finally slayed the dragon.”
“Actually, I think Sherman just got tired and ran out of fire.”
“I’m still going to call you Dragon Slayer, at least for a week.”
Tina reappears. “McGregor’s back,” she says.
“Speak of the devil,” Harris says, looking concerned. “Want me to go with you?”
I shake my head a little too emphatically. Harris and Sherman have locked horns too many times in the past.
“Damn bastard, you’re right. Don’t know how you do it, Jillian. That man brings out the Irish in me.”
“Sherman’s like my dad,” I answer, smiling. “I have forty years’ experience in how to negotiate a proud man into doing something he doesn’t want to do.”
“Go get ’em, Dragon Slayer.”
S
herman sits in the same chair he occupied earlier, his thick body filling the armchair and his powerful anima filling the room.
I take my seat across from him.
“Hello again,” I say.
“I need a favor.”
I tilt my head.
“I’ve changed my mind.”
I don’t breathe. Like the Compton school, we need the McGregor deal.
Without the two, I might as well start updating my resume. Harris Development is two jobs away from going belly-up like a thousand other developers that have been wiped out in the last three years. Already we’ve suffered layoffs, bonus cuts, and salary freezes. Compton Middle School and the Sherman merger will ensure our future for the next five years.
The old man raises his hand. “Not about the deal.”
I let go of my breath and wait for the rest.
“About the sale,” he says, “the firm is yours, but I don’t want the sale made public.”
I tilt my head.
“For two months,” he continues, “for two months Harris needs to continue as you have for the last two years, as though we’re still negotiating, then you can announce the merger.”
“Why?” But I know why and it makes me sad. How did it get to the point where it is? I wonder for a moment about my own marriage and if Gordon and my wounds will poison our children as well, if the future is looking at me.
He shakes his liver-spotted head. “The money needs to be transferred, but the sale needs to be kept quiet for two months.”
“That’s going to be difficult.”
“Difficult is your specialty.”
The deal we already made was difficult. Sherman fought to protect the people who work for him and that made things complicated. He negotiated that McGregor Architects remain sovereign for three years after the merger to guarantee, or at least hopefully guarantee, that his employees would have a chance to survive the merger and then either prove their worth to Harris or move of their own accord.
“Sherman, difficult is one thing, but do you really want to do this? This morning, we were good to go.”
“The future is not what it used to be.”
“Now you’re quoting Valéry?”
“Smart and beautiful. Where were you when I was younger?”
“Studying Valéry.”
His smile is sad. “They’re not getting any of it, and I don’t want them to know. I don’t want my last days to be a war with my children attempting to declare me incompetent.”
“Sherman, they’re your family.”
His head bends to his chest, causing two chins.
In the two years we’ve been discussing the merger, histories have been revealed. Sherman knows about Addie and Drew and that Gordon is a police officer and that my dad recently suffered a stroke.
And I know about Sherman’s three failed marriages, his older son’s struggle to find success, his middle son’s struggle to find sobriety, and his younger son’s struggle to find anything of meaning at all.
“I called Tom,” he says, his eyes still on the carpet, “to tell him I’d closed the deal, but before I could tell him, he interrupted to tell me he was getting another divorce and that I was calling at a really bad time.
“I couldn’t call Kyle because he’s in lockdown, so I called Jordan, and in the background, I hear him tell his girlfriend to tell me he wasn’t home.”
He raises his head, his yellow eyes slashed with rage and hurt. “Not a penny, Jillian. Not one red cent.”
“Sherman…”
His hand stops me. “Don’t feel sorry for me. I don’t deserve it. I did this. God, country, family. For me it was my ego, my business, a dozen mistresses, then somewhere down the list was my family. I did this, but I’m done paying for it. Sink or swim. They didn’t have the nurture, but by damn it, they have the nature. If there’s a single one of my genes in those boys, they’ll make it. But not on my dime. This is my way of making it right.”
Right as a two-headed nickel.
Genes don’t cut it. I’m living proof. I come from one of the world’s greatest men and one of the world’s most tenacious women. Sink or swim, and I’m sinking fast.
“Two months?” I say, the lump swelling in my throat. He looks better than he has in months, but only because he’s not fighting anymore. In two months, it will be over.
He stands. “Two months.”
“You’re sure about this?”
“This is my last gift to them. They won’t see it that way, but it is. I can’t protect them anymore, and in the end, we’re all destined to disappoint.”
His sorrow is so complete that it weights the air, and I think I don’t want to live to be old…or rather, I don’t want to live to be old alone.
I stand and walk around the desk. “I’ll see what I can do,” I say, though I’m completely unsure how I can convince Harris to hand over eighteen million dollars but keep the merger under wraps, knowing the sale will be questioned when it’s disclosed and that the one man who can explain will be dead.
Sherman lingers half in, half out the door. “I wish I’d had a daughter.” Then he’s gone.
I check my watch, 5:43.
Game’s at six.
Gordon’s voice from this morning resounds in my head.
My phone buzzes. Harris wants an update.
G
ordon stands in the dugout door, its frame dwarfed by his size. His hands are relaxed at his side, a congenial mask of encouragement on his handsome face. My glance moves to Drew standing on the mound. His chin, my chin, juts forward in determination. His eyes, his father’s eyes, focus on the catcher’s mitt forty-six feet away.
Every fiber of my being wishes for a strike.
Drew sets, his feet come together on the rubber, his right hand grips the ball inside the glove. His thin arm hammers high over his head as his leg rears up, and with all fifty-three pounds, he hurls the white sphere toward its destiny.
Crack.
My wish worked, a perfect pitch right down the middle.
Worked too well. The ball soars into right field, and the outfielder fumbles it, and for a split second, I hate the child. The runner rounds the middle base and heads for third. The outfielder overthrows his cutoff, and the runner scores. The game is over.
Around me, people shuffle and chatter, the moment that was so important a minute before absorbed into the present like the backwash of a large wave.
“Hi, Jillian.”
I turn to see Michelle Garner, an almost-friend, and it takes a second too long for my required smile to find my face.
“You okay?” she asks.
“Yeah, fine. Good game.”
Michelle’s not who I want to see. I never want to see her. Solid, genuinely nice, and with a terrier-like acuity—I try to avoid people like Michelle as much as possible.
Her brown eyes study me as she says, “Shame they lost. They were so close.”
I smile and nod. “Win some, lose some, but the boys played well,” I say, while marveling inside at how well I’ve perfected the language of saying the pointless things humans say to each other all day long.
Before everything changed, there was a possibility Michelle and I would become friends. Drew and her son, Max, are the same age, and, when they were babies, we’d gone to lunch a couple times and had met at the pool.
“Pizza at Gina’s, right?” she asks.
I’m bone tired, and the idea of pizza with the team as the parents discuss the intricacies of eight-year-old baseball makes my throbbing head swell.
“Perhaps another night. I’ve got some work to catch up on.”
Michelle’s head tilts slightly and her pupils dilate and recede a flicker as she discerns the lie, then she offers her own short smile and says, “Well, maybe next time.”
I continue past her toward the restrooms, avoiding her perceptive eyes that look beyond the veneer and recognize more in my superficial platitudes than our acquaintance and polite protocol allows.
In the dugout, eleven of the twelve Laguna Beach Tigers are trying to dislodge a ball that’s burrowed into the fence behind the dugout. The twelfth player, my own young Tiger, quietly gathers his equipment.
For ten minutes, I sit on the toilet with my face in my hands, and when I’m certain the postgame lag time of small talk is almost done, I return to my neighbors and friends.
And family.
My mom is ahead of my dad and approaching fast, her dog, Martha, a yippy terrier mix, beside her. The two of them leave my dad literally in the dust with his walker as he tries to negotiate the uneven park without being hit by wayward children, balls, and skateboards.
My mom wears a bright red Nike sweat suit that clings too tight to the extra flesh around her hips that no amount of exercise can correct, and like a mother duck with absolute entitlement, she waddles toes-out toward me.
“Jill, what took you so long? We’ve been waiting.”
I ignore her and continue past her so my dad won’t have to continue his struggle to get to me.
I lean in to give him a gentle kiss on the good cheek that can still feel me, the half of him his stroke didn’t destroy. “Good game, Pops, didn’t you think?”
He nods, and his eyes twinkle. Baseball is his passion—on the field when he was a young man and in the spectator seats when he could no longer play. For six years, he was a designated hitter for the Orioles. When his bat got unlucky, he retired and bought his first restaurant. He used to joke that he was a better ballplayer than businessman, which wasn’t saying much, since his career average hovered around .225.
