I Like You Just Fine When You're Not Around (14 page)

“Go on,” Tig said.

“I liked everything about this woman, but . . . .”

Tig thought of her mother's fearful face, the new tremor in her hands. The people in the auditorium waited for the serene, nonjudgmental response from the resident expert and gazed at Tig with quiet expectation. Narrowing her eyes at Pete's unseen face, she said, “What? She wasn't exciting enough? Let me guess, you were not
in
love? Did the hot sex turn to tepid grocery shopping? Is that it?”

“No,” he said quickly. “The problem is that she's so busy taking care of everyone else in her life that there's little room for me.”

“Maybe she was busy doing what she had to do, instead of doing what she wanted.”

“She didn't need me.”

Tig opened her mouth to insist that she did need him. But that insistence clogged her throat. People whispered in the auditorium. Macie and Jean stared at Tig.

“You didn't need me, Tig.”

Realization lit up Macie's face. She fingered the dog collar at her throat and leaned over to whisper to Jean. Jean turned her head and stared.

Tig said, “Yes . . . .”

Macie hit a button. The theme song blasted out of the surround-sound speakers, cutting off any qualification Tig might have offered.
Yes, you are right. Yes, I did
.

A loud voice-over announced a commercial break, followed by a buzzing of conversation among the audience. Jean bolted out of the control booth and strode over to Tig.

“What was that?”

Tig brushed her face with her hands. “Are we almost through?”

“How are you feeling?”

“How many more calls?”

“We'll fill in with some cream puff call-ins, then complete the hour with music.”

“That was more than I bargained for.”

“He said he needs you. That call sounded like love.”

Tig stared at Jean. “You think it's love to take a very private conversation into a public forum?”

With a pointed look, Jean said, “That's what we're doing here. Did you miss that?”

Tig looked away.

Jean said, “I bet he didn't think it would take such a serious turn. Hearing it over the speakers gives everything weight. A broadcast almost forces things like threats of divorce and proposals.”

“Maybe he's thinking, ‘Tag, you're it.'”

“Cut and run.” Jean smiled.

“Coward.”

“I'd be afraid of you, too, if I wasn't your boss.”

Macie knocked on the booth's glass window and gestured at her watch. Jean made her way back inside the small soundproof room.

“Okay, I can do this. I'm ready.”

The
On the Air
sign flickered. Macie sat ready with a caller, but was interrupted by a loud unfamiliar voice in the auditorium.

“Well, well, well, if it isn't the relationship bitch I keep hearing so much about.”

Newman Harmeyer stood in the open doorway at the back of the studio, his words bounced down the aisle like runaway basketballs. The audience gasped.

He turned to them. “Ladies and gentlemen, did you know that Dr. Monahan here singlehandedly ended my twelve-year marriage? Why doesn't somebody call and ask about that?”

Newman lumbered closer to the stage. He was so disheveled that Tig wouldn't have recognized him on the street, dressed as he was in gray sweat pants and a plaid hunting shirt buttoned inaccurately across his belly. He stumbled during his rapid descent down the aisle.

Jean stood at attention in the booth and Macie, unschooled in radio crises, was frozen in place, staring.

Tig walked to the edge of the stage. “When you decided to have an affair, you effectively ended the marriage, whether you knew it at the time or not. I mean, unless that was in your vows. I promise to love, honor, and screw around as long as we both shall live and my wife doesn't find out.”

Newman shouted, “She means nothing to me. Jean, she was nothing.”

Tig shook her head. “I hope that's true, for your sake, Mr. Harmeyer, because I doubt your lover will enjoy coming back to be your ‘nothing' again.” She pointed to the
On the Air
sign.

With rapt attention, the audience watched the drama play out on stage.

Newman turned and yelled at the booth, “Jean! Jean, don't do this. Let me back into the house.”

Behind the glass in the booth, Jean pointed and Macie switched over to music. The tension in Jean's jaw was visible even from where Tig stood. Stiff and unyielding, she walked out of sight.

“Jean.” Newman's face smeared into a mass of sorrowful confusion. He mumbled her name again, and Newman's bravado slipped off his shoulders, down his arms, and seemed to drip from his fingertips.

Touched, Tig walked down the steps of the stage and said, “Mr. Harmeyer, let's get you into a cab.”

He allowed himself to be guided up the corridor between the array of faces in the crowd, some compassionate, others sour. He stumbled once and muttered, “I love her.”

Tig supported his arm and said, “I don't think it seemed that way to Jean.”

He wrenched free and shoved her aside. “Fuck you.”

Tig lost her footing and banged against the theater wall.

“This is your fault. Your fucking fault.” He advanced, his arm drawn back.

Two men in the audience started in his direction.

“Newman.” Jean Harmeyer's voice boomed from backstage. Newman froze and looked for his wife's face. Without showing herself, she said, “Go wherever it is you're calling home these days.”

Cowed, Newman frantically searched the room, dropped his arms and left more steadily than he had arrived, muttering, “I don't have a home.”

Out of the shadows, Jean walked to the front of the stage. All heads turned her way. “Well, that's all, folks. Tell your friends. Never a dull moment on
Is That Fair?
with Dr. Monahan. And remember, relationships are loaded guns. Don't operate them without a safety.”

While Jean spoke, Tig moved quickly onto the stage and out of sight. Conversation broke out in earnest. Cell phones were dialed and Tig, Jean, and Macie took refuge off stage in the green room. Macie said, “Holy shit, you two. What do we need callers for?”

• • •

Tig lifted each leg slowly, and climbed into her car. The radio week was over. She rummaged for her phone in her bag, took it off vibrate, and for the thousandth time considered calling Pete. She squinted at the screen. Five missed calls. There was voicemail from Wendy.

“Hey, I don't feel so good. I'll call you from the hospital.”

Tig sat up straight.

The second call from Wendy sounded scared. “I'm in labor. I can't get through at the radio station. I just threw up.”

Tig fastened her seatbelt, started her car, and pressed the next button. Two hang-ups. She listened to the last message.

Weak-voiced and weary, Wendy said, “Hey, you're an aunt.” A male in the background said something. Wendy responded, “No, I'll take her.” Back on the line she said, “I'm at St. Mary's 212.”

• • •

Tig rushed down the hall of St. Mary's birth suites and opened a darkened room. The baby, like a tiny wrapped burrito with a striped hat, was parked next to the bed in an open Plexiglas rolling crib. A tiny, ruddy heel peeked out from under the swaddling. Wendy, curled on her side and covered with a sheet, looked too small to have delivered a whole human being, even this tiny one. “Isn't she pretty?” Tig stood over the infant, tugged the white flannel blanket under the infant's chin. Wendy went on to say, “She looks like a bush baby when her eyes are open.”

When Tig saw her sister she started. Bloody red masses colored both of Wendy's irises. “What happened to your eyes?”

“I broke blood vessels when I was pushing. Thankfully, it went fast. I was only in labor for a total of three hours.”

“The entire time my cell phone was off.”

“It gave me something to swear about in labor.”

“I'm really sorry, Wen. I thought we'd have more warning.”

“You and me both.” Wendy's eyes filled with tears.

Tig sat on the bed. “I'm so sorry I wasn't here.”

“That's not it. The nurses were great. It's just that I don't know how I'm going to do this without totally screwing it up.” She grabbed Tig's wrist with icy fingers. “Promise me you'll help. Promise me you won't let me hurt her.”

“Of course you won't hurt her.”

“I could drop her. Or forget I have her.”

“You won't.” Tig brushed her sister's face with her hand. “You're exhausted. Go to sleep, now.”

“Don't you want to know what I named her?”

“Yes, tell me.”

“Clementine. It's a cartoon name. Like ours, and we turned out all right. Right?”

Tig smiled. “Right. Clementine. It's perfect.”

“Will you stay until I fall asleep?”

“I'll stay as long as you need me.”

In minutes, Wendy was lightly snoring. Tig was about to leave when her phone rang, the sound muffled by her pocket. She looked at the screen. It was Pete. She almost answered it. She almost did. But she didn't have the energy, and put the phone back in her pocket. Tig took her sister's hand, then touched her niece's foot. The baby's foot looked for all the world like a tiny new red potato with peas attached.

She swallowed hard, feeling her eyes well with tears in the quiet hospital room. Tig grew up knowing she would be a mother, like she knew she would learn to drive or go to college. It was only just recently that she had begun to acknowledge that there was another variable in the equation of adding a human to the world: she needed a plus one.

She'd always been a loner. When Wendy graduated from high school without college plans, Tig remembered feeling cheated. All of her friends' siblings had decorated their graduation caps with their prospective colleges—UW-Madison, USC, Notre Dame—but not Wendy. She'd glued flower petals over the top of her mortarboard and said, “I'm a free agent. I can't commit.” Tig knew what that really meant for herself: she'd have to spend more time living under the shadow of the mercurial Wendy. The beautiful, free-spirited Monahan sister. The one
Most Likely to Travel the World
. When you are the sister
Most Likely to Balance Your Checkbook
, you are easily overlooked in the most unfair of ways. “Excitement” was what most people wanted, apparently. Excitement and unpredictability.

Clementine made a little pigeon coo in her throat that touched Tig in an immediate and alarming way. The sound seemed to fill her own throat with something she would describe later to Wendy as necessity.

“You make that sound again, Clementine, and I'll whisk you away and raise you as my own.”

• • •

Hours later, she collected Thatcher from her house and drove to the nursing home. In the parking lot, Tig rested her head against the seat and considered going home, sleeping for a week. Suspended from the rearview mirror was the bracelet she had found in her mother's room.

She pulled it down.
If I could tell you.
She undid the clasp, placed the bracelet around her wrist and admired it, then fished her phone out and finally dialed Pete. It clicked over to voicemail. Tig opened her mouth, meaning to tell him she loved him, longing for a simple response. Instead she said, “Hey, I'm an aunt,” and hung up.

Tig searched the St. Mary's parking garage with Wendy's keys in hand. She pressed the lock/unlock buttons as a locator, and used the insistent beeping sound to find her sister's car. Inside, Tig pulled the visor down, looking for the parking garage ticket. A dried bundle of rosemary with a flattened green velvet ribbon fell into her lap, revealing a glossy photo of Phil beneath it: perfectly straight teeth, a thick head of hair, and the facial bones of a Grecian created the unlikely image of a terrifically handsome man who didn't want children.

Tig flipped the photo over and read, “There's rosemary, that's for remembrance,” written in blue ink and signed with a cursive P. She replaced the bundle, which was apparently given to her sister to combat any post-relationship amnesia, and started the car. Now her sister held the ultimate genetic forget-me-not bundle, she thought.

Wendy waited in a wheelchair with a nurse at the hospital's exit, Clementine already tucked into her car seat on the ground next to her. Tig hopped out of the driver's seat and helped Wendy and Clementine get settled. Considering the triathlon of labor, delivery, and recovery, Tig said with a healthy degree of wonder, “You look good, Wen.”

Wendy shifted on the doughnut-shaped plastic pillow in the front seat. “That's because you can't see my ass. If you could, you'd re-admit me.” Tig accelerated and the car locks thumped shut, sealing the three safely and completely together as they moved forward as a family. “I thought we could stop to see Mom before we go home.”

Wendy crumpled in the front seat, her head resting on the window. “What? No. No way. My milk hasn't even come in. We're going home.”

“Just for a minute. She's your mother.”

“I'm not Wonder Woman.”

“Just for a second?”

Wendy turned and glared at Tig. “When you get pregnant, you can deliver in Mom's shower if you want. We are going home.”

“Maybe tomorrow, then.”

Wendy said, “I feel like I've been hit by a bus. God, my ass is killing me.” She repositioned herself and the plastic pillow farted. Wendy shook her head in disgust. “The baby cried all night. I tried feeding her, but nothing happened.”

“Did you call for help?”

“Yeah, the nurse came in and tried to shove my breast into the baby's mouth. She said my breasts were pendulous.”

“Pendulous? God. What did you say?”

“I told her to fuck off.”