Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) (15 page)

In return, she’d given him permission to stop being afraid of the dark. To look forward instead of back, because there was too much good in him to give up. Too much wonderful potential.

She thought, in a marriage, that no one could ever sustain that kind of intimacy indefinitely. At some point, months or years into it, you had to start building up some boundaries again, to wall off
yours
from
mine
from
ours
, because life happened, and it wasn’t practical to think it could keep happening to both of you, communally, forever.

Everyone needed secrets. It wasn’t possible to raise three children with another person and keep telling him every single thought that went through your head, every fear you had, everything he did that annoyed you. You had to make selections. Edit yourself. Edit the narrative of your day.

Every marriage needed roles. One person made dinner most of the time, another took out the trash. One put the kids to bed, another dressed their wounds. It didn’t mean you couldn’t shake things up. It only meant that you had to divide up the day, divide up the jobs, the same way you divided up what you gave each other access to.

But sometimes the divisions you made stopped making sense after a while. You resented taking the trash out because it had to go out during the only time on Wednesday morning when you could shower, and when you finally complained about it, your husband said,
I can take the trash out
.

Oh. Right. Duh.

You had to make choices, and they got set in stone, which only meant that sometimes you had to take a hard look at all the walls your choices had put up, grab a mallet, and knock a few down.

She’d made the right choice in the beginning when she chose Tony. Whatever his faults—the overwork, the constant worry, all the parts of parenting that he left to her so he could pursue his single-minded notion of male responsibility—his profile was the one she wanted to look at, driving down the road. His hands on the wheel.

Tony’s smile was the one she wanted to see in the dark. Tony’s hammer knocking down her walls.

This is love, then
.

Not Tony’s emotional emergency flight to Montego Bay or the silly stranger game in the bar, not getting her hair chopped off or her pubic hair ripped out. Not grand gestures or great sex or tearful conversation on the beach—but the thing that all of that was reaching for. That moment when you remembered why you were in this in the first place, and you came back to it. You figured out that somewhere along the line, you’d pressed Pause on your marriage, your truth, your real feelings. You looked at the button.

And you hit it again to start the music playing.

Maybe no one could hear it but her and Tony, but that didn’t matter. It was playing inside her now, and she didn’t simply hope things would change. She knew it. She would
make
them change. Tony would, too.

She
knew
.

“Thank you for coming to get me,” she said.

He put his hand over the back of her neck, rubbing his thumb along her bare nape. “Anytime, bun.”

Ten minutes later, they were home.

The house blazed with a profligate amount of light. The kids spilled into the garage, Jacob’s hands on the passenger door handle, his body blocking her so she couldn’t even get out of the truck. “Mama!”

It was his babyish name for her—the name he didn’t use anymore because his brothers teased him, but tonight it didn’t matter. He climbed up. She helped him into her lap, swung her legs over the side.

“What happened to your hair?” he asked.

Anthony was spinning in circles, Clark hanging back in the doorway to the kitchen. Behind him, her mother.

The dog barking, paws landing on her legs. Everybody talking at once.

Tony carried the luggage in. Amber carried Jacob, steering Anthony with a hand on his back. There were model airplanes spread out on newspaper on the kitchen table, Amber’s dad and Jamila there, along with Katie and her boyfriend, a fine paintbrush in Sean’s fingers.

“We made planes, Mama! Mine is the red one, and Ant’s is the blue, and Clark got to make the
big
one but it’s not done yet. Grandpa showed us how. And I was sick this morning but I’m not anymore, and Grandma says it’s because I was malingering but she won’t tell me what that means. Did you bring me anything?”

“Yeah, what did you get us?” Anthony asked.

It kept going like that. Noise and lively energy. A house full of bright light and life.

Clark stood quiet, watchful on the periphery. Katie looked at her with a question in her eyes.
Did it work? Are you guys better?

Amber waited for the yoke to settle over her shoulders and weigh her down, because yeah, there was going to be a lot of plodding in the next few days. Hours still to spend tonight, getting the kids to sleep. She’d have to give each of them time alone with her. Figure out what to tell them that would be true, and would give them peace. Everyone in this kitchen would want to talk to her, at some point. Well, everyone but Sean. And their anxiety—their expectations—that was a weight to bear, too.

Anthony ricocheted off the table, collided with the suitcase in Tony’s hand, tripped over the dog, fell down, and hit his head on the wooden step stool Jacob used to reach the water cups. He started to cry.

Tony caught her eye across the crowded kitchen, over the sound of her mother’s voice and Anthony’s howling. “I’ll take this one,” he said.

And she wasn’t afraid.

You
, she thought.
I choose you. I choose this
.

Again
.

Again
.

Always you
.

* * *

Katie and Sean left first, right when Amber took the kids upstairs. Then Jamila, off to join her boyfriend at the hotel in Mount Pleasant where she stayed when she came to Ohio.

Janet and Derek were last.

“Would you go warm up the car?” Janet asked her husband, and Derek cleared out,
leaving Tony alone again with his mother-in-law.

In all the years he and Amber had been together, Tony couldn’t remember being alone with Janet more than a handful of times. Now it was happening for the second time in a couple days—and once again, he fervently wished he were somewhere else.

“So what happened?” she asked.

“What do you think?”

Because he thought Amber looked different already. That she wore her relief on her skin, in her face, and he could see it when he looked at himself in the mirror, too.

He thought the kids could sense it.

It seemed so obvious to him, he couldn’t believe it wasn’t obvious to Janet.

But she was an ornery old woman, so he was waiting for her to say
How should I know?
or something like it.

Instead she said, “I left Derek once.”

The confession seemed to echo in the empty kitchen. “I didn’t know that.”

“I don’t think any of the kids realized. It was right after we moved here. Katie wasn’t born yet, and Caleb was little. I told Amber we were going to visit her auntie in Detroit, but I packed every suitcase we owned.”

She turned away from him and looked out the picture window at the driveway, where Derek sat in the car, a dark shadow behind the windshield.

“I was so mad at him.” She sounded more vulnerable than he was used to hearing her. Like a regular person instead of his fierce, intimidating mother-in-law. “I was mad that he didn’t know how hard it was for me, moving so far away and being with the kids all day, day in and day out, without much help from him. I missed my sister. I missed feeling like I was somebody other than a snot rag for my kids to wipe their noses on.” She smiled faintly. “I hate having things wiped on me. Absolutely
hate
it.”

She rummaged through her purse for a package of tissues, extracted one, and wiped her eyes. Then she looked at Tony.

“It’s hard, what she’s doing,” she said.

“I know.”

She shook her head. “No. You think you know, but you can’t. That’s the worst part.”

Janet looked outside again. “I left him because I thought, ‘It can’t get any worse. If I’m
divorced, I can move back home, and even if I’m single I’ll have my family to help me raise the kids. Derek won’t miss us. He’s always working, anyway, or at the bar. We’ll both be happier.’ I was so sure of that, it almost seemed like … like an act of grace. I convinced myself I was doing him a favor.”

She looked outside for a minute, silent. Tony wondered what he was supposed to say. Upstairs, he could hear Amber talking. Jake’s happy chatter.

He could hear footsteps on the wood floors, and he thought,
I built this place. This home, for my family
. Wood and cement and metal, arranged together in a way that he’d thought would please his wife.

But he could do it again, if that was what had to happen. Build another house, a smaller house. Renovate a place. Fix up a rental.

He didn’t believe leaving could ever be an act of grace. He thought the acts of grace happened when you stayed. When you found something you thought you’d lost, gave something you’d forgotten you had, got something back that you didn’t even know you needed.

“What happened when you got to Detroit?” he asked.

“He came after me.”

“What did he say to convince you to come back?”

“Him?” Janet turned to look at Tony. She had this way of looking down her nose, even though she was shorter. “He didn’t have to say anything. I already knew. Every mile we traveled from the house, I knew. I wouldn’t be happier without him. Amber and Caleb wouldn’t. And he would be miserable without me. The man can’t even work a washing machine. He doesn’t eat properly unless I nag. We were in it together, you see? There wasn’t anything to be done about it.”

She put the tissue in her purse and clutched at it for a moment before she met his eyes again and touched his arm. “Love is mean like that,” she said. “It doesn’t give you good choices. You think it’s going to free you—that you’ll get married and turn into a butterfly or some such silly nonsense. But marriage makes almost everything harder.”

Tony looked down at her hand, wondering when she’d touched him before voluntarily. He couldn’t remember. Her veins stood out, tunnels beneath the smooth brown skin. It looked thinner than he’d expected. She’d aged since he met her. Aged a hell of a lot since Derek had his stroke.

Her life hadn’t been easy—certainly not in the past couple of years. Her youngest daughter moving back to Camelot in a funk, her husband’s hospitalization, her son coming home and all the anxiety when the paparazzi had descended and he’d hooked up with his wife. A lot to worry about, if you were the worrying type, and Janet was.

When Derek was in the hospital, Janet had sat by his bed for days, refusing to leave. Refusing to eat.

She loved fiercely—loved
hard
—and he felt an affinity to her he’d never felt before, because it couldn’t be easy to be Janet. It was painful to feel like everything you loved was walking around vulnerable, and you were the only thing standing between it and disaster. Your vigilance. Your protective work.

So inadequate, but all you had.

He knew it was painful, because he was that way, too. They had that in common. Fierce vigilance, and Amber.

Tony hugged her.

She didn’t like it. She stood there with her arms loose, sniffling again. But she was right. He didn’t have a mom anymore. All he had was Janet.

She wasn’t so bad.

She was wrong about love, though. Love wasn’t mean. It was life that was mean.

Love was where you found the strength to deal with it.

He rubbed her hair, messed it up a little like he always had done to his mom, and said, “Thanks for pinch-hitting with the kids.”

“It was no trouble.”

He let her go. She patted her hair back into place and smoothed down her blouse.

She looked at the floor and said, “That’s the reward, you know. Watching your own children find someone who makes them happier than they ever were alone. Meeting your grandchildren and watching them grow up. They’re so beautiful, you almost wish you hadn’t, because it hurts, and you’d thought you were done with that. You’d thought that part of your life—that difficult,
unforgivably
sentimental part—must be done with, and thank heavens, you know?”

Her eyes went back out the window. Drawn to her husband.

“But then I see the way Amber is with Jacob. So patient. And Caleb with that little boy
who needs a father so badly. I saw Katie here in the kitchen tonight with this man I don’t know, but he looks at her like she’s the sun and the moon, and she is, of course. So that’s good. And Derek …”

She looked up at Tony, tears swimming in her eyes. “Derek made those airplanes with the boys like he used to do with Caleb, and it’s too beautiful. It’s too beautiful to live without.”

Tony’s eyes were stinging. “Don’t you dare make me cry.”

Janet got the crumpled-up tissue back out and pressed it to her nose. She took a deep breath to collect herself. “Men shouldn’t cry,” she said sternly. “It’s unseemly.”

“Go home, old woman.”

She smiled at him, a little wavery. “Just take care of my little girl, okay?”

“I will,” he said. He would. “I think we’ll be fine.”

Janet nodded. “That’s good,” she said. “Because if you break my daughter’s heart, I’m going to kill you.”

Tony waited in bed for his wife.

He had the TV tuned to a hockey game, but when she came into the room he watched her instead. She puttered around, moving in and out of the master bath to put away her shampoo and toothpaste. Dropping dirty clothes into the chute that went down to the laundry room on the first floor.

He’d put that chute in so she’d never have to carry baskets of dirty laundry down the stairs. She liked it.

He’d build her another one.

“I need a quick shower,” she said. “Wash off the grime.”

“I can wait.” He’d already showered while she was talking to Clark.

She went into the bathroom, and the water came on. He flipped off the TV and turned the overhead light out. Hands beneath the pillow, pushing it up into his head, he turned his face toward the cracked-open bathroom door and the sliver of light from where Amber was.