Stand-in Groom (12 page)

Johnny paused, but Chelsea didn’t speak. She sat, watching water drip down the tile walls, trying to imagine
her
father going into a burning plane to try
to save the pilot’s life. She couldn’t picture it—because he’d never do it. Oh, he’d have gone in without batting an eye if his money had been in danger of going up in flames, but not for some stranger.

“But then, after my mother died,” Johnny continued, “I was going through some of her papers, sorting things out, you know, and I found my father’s army records, along with some letters he wrote to her. It didn’t take me long to realize that that story she told me about him wanting money to go to college—that was something of a rather huge white lie. The truth was, he was busted for knocking over a liquor store, and since he was only eighteen and it was his first known offense, he was given a choice: jail or the army. That was right around the time he’d gotten my mother pregnant and married her. He had a wife and kid to think about, so he took his chances in ’Nam. He actually made it through his first tour without even being injured.

“The way I figure it, he came back and kicked around for about a year before he started to get into trouble again—or at least until he started to get caught. This time he served about six months in prison, and when he got out, he reenlisted. I
read a letter he wrote to my mother from Walpole right before his release, telling her he didn’t know what else he could do besides go back to Vietnam. He couldn’t handle the grind of nine to five, and he was a lousy criminal too. The only thing he’d ever been good at was patrolling the jungles of Southeast Asia. So he went back, and he died trying to save some stranger’s life. He was the only one who went into the burning plane to help that pilot. The
only
one.” He was silent for a moment. “I could never figure out why my mother didn’t just tell me the truth.”

“Maybe she wanted you to remember him as a hero,” Chelsea said softly.

“But that’s just it,” Johnny said. “Didn’t she realize that the truth was better than the story she told? I mean, here’s this two-bit criminal, this total screwup of a guy who can’t hold a job, who’s done hard time in Walpole, and he’s the only man—one out of nearly a hundred soldiers—who can’t just stand there and listen to another man burn to death. My father didn’t go into that plane because he wanted to die. He wasn’t trying to be a hero. He probably went in there cursing that pilot to hell and back. But he did go in. He couldn’t keep
himself from trying to save that guy. Everyone thought he was some good-for-nothing lowlife, but inside, he was a better man than all of them. To me, it makes him even more of a hero, since he wasn’t a hero to start with.”

“You’re right, but I can see it from your mother’s point of view too,” Chelsea told him. “I could see how she wouldn’t want her son growing up knowing his father had done time in prison. Didn’t you tell me that she was a doctor?”

“Yeah. She went back to school to get her degree about four years after my dad died. It took her that long to deal with it. My old man may not have been able to hold a job, but he was one of those guys that charmed the socks off of everyone he met. Everybody loved him.” Johnny laughed. “My mother had this note written to him by the warden up at Walpole, wishing him the best of luck upon his parole, can you believe it? It was in with his letters and stuff.

“Anyway, she never really got over his death, but she finally reached a point where she had to move forward with her own life. I remember when she sat me down and told me she was going back to college—that she was going for a medical degree. I
was eight that year, and she gave me my own key to the apartment, because I was going to have to let myself in after school, while she was in class. That was when I first learned to cook.” He laughed. “I had to, or I would’ve starved to death. My mother almost never got home before eight-thirty for about six years. I started cooking
her
dinner.”

“You must’ve been scared—eight years old and alone for all that time every day.”

“I was used to it. It was no big deal.”

“When I was twelve, I spent three days totally by myself—and it was a
very
big deal,” Chelsea said. “And necessity
wasn’t
the mother of invention in my case. I
didn’t
learn to cook—I just ate junk food the entire time. You know—and this is something you should know about me, seeing as how I
am
your wife—but I
still
can’t cook. I’m the kind of person who can burn water.”

“Maybe I could give you a few lessons.”

Chelsea closed her eyes, not wanting to think about the kind of lessons she wanted Johnny Anziano to give her. “I don’t think so. If I learned how, then I’d have to cook all the time. As it stands, I’ve got a great reason for ordering takeout.”

“I love to cook. I loved it when I was eight too. I’d much rather cook my own dinner than eat out. I’m too critical of other people’s cooking.”

“Do you really know how to cook?” she asked.
“Really
cook?”

“Isn’t it my turn to ask a question?”

“No, I think it’s still my turn,” she told him, knowing full well that she was wrong.

“No way! You just asked me about fourteen questions in a row,” he told her. “It’s definitely my turn. And I want to know why you spent three days by yourself when you were twelve.”

Chelsea stretched her foot toward the faucet, and with her toe she lifted the toggle that opened the drain, letting some of the cooling water out of the tub. “I was in some really intense negotiations with my parents about trying out for the middle-school field-hockey team. I didn’t want to do it because Sierra had played and won Field Hockey Goddess of the East Coast, or some major award like that. The way I saw it, Sierra was Miss Perfect, and this was just going to be another way that I would fail to live up to her glorious standards.”

She closed the drain with her toe, but then scooted forward to add more hot water to the tub.
She raised her voice to be heard over the rush of the water. “So after they told me that I
would
play on the team—I didn’t have a choice in the matter—I counternegotiated by packing up my things and moving out.”

Johnny laughed in surprise. “Are you saying that you ran away from home?”

“Yep. And you want to know the really stupid thing?”

“Oh, yeah,” Johnny said. “I get the feeling this is going to be good.”

“After I left, nobody missed me.”

“You’re kidding.”

Chelsea shut off the hot water. “Nope. I happened to run away on the weekend of the big Harvard/Yale game. My entire family spent all of Saturday preparing for the game, all of Sunday tailgating in Cambridge, and all of Monday recovering. Everyone just assumed I was home, pouting.”

“Where did you go?”

“I drove out to our beach house in Truro—on the Cape.”

“You
drove
?”

“Yep. Took Daddy’s Jaguar and headed for Cape Cod.”

“I’m assuming that wasn’t the first time you’d been behind the wheel of a car.” Johnny paused. “Of course, I realize that with you, I probably shouldn’t assume anything.”

“No, you were right the first time. Troy taught me to drive when I was ten. I was kind of like his pet monkey—it amused him to teach me to do all sorts of grown-up things. That same year he tried to get me to drink beer and smoke, too, but I was a smart kid. I hated the taste of beer, and I knew smoking would give me cancer.” She swirled the water around in the tub, trying to mix the cool with the hot. “But I
loved
to drive. I had to sit on about three pillows and pull the seat all the way up so I could reach the gas pedal. Troy used to take me out a couple times a week. Sometimes he’d even wake me up in the middle of the night so I could get a chance to drive on the highway without anyone around to see me and call the cops. By the time I was twelve, I was an excellent driver. I’d probably already clocked a few thousand miles.”

“Driving, smoking, drinking … I guess what Troy couldn’t teach you, his good friend Bent did, huh?” Johnny asked.

“Is that your next question?”

“No, I was just marveling at the irony. So back to this story: You took Daddy’s Jag, and you actually made it all the way out to Truro without getting stopped?”

Chelsea put her head back and watched the flickering candlelight reflecting off the moisture-laden walls. “It was off-season. No one gave me a second glance. At least not until I’d been at the beach house for three days. That was when I was nabbed—by a patrol cop who knew there wasn’t supposed to be anyone staying at the Spencer cottage that week. He brought me down to the police station and called my parents—who still didn’t even know I was gone.” She laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “What a joke.”

“So did you have to play on the field-hockey team?”

“You bet. I was grounded for everything
except
field-hockey practice for three months. It was not a happy year—that was only the first of a long string of power struggles I didn’t stand a chance of winning.”

“Maybe that’s really why you don’t want to get married,” Johnny suggested. “Because your parents want you to.”

“Thank you so much, Dr. Freud. I think
maybe
I’m a little bit more in control of my own life now that I’m twenty-eight years old.”

“Ready for my next question?” Johnny was smoothly changing the subject. He was a very smart man.

“Isn’t it my turn yet?”

“Nope. If there was one single thing in your life that you could do differently, what would it be?”

Chelsea didn’t have to think about that for long. “I wouldn’t have had that affair with Benton Scott. Definitely not.”

“That wasn’t your fault—you were too young,” Johnny said. “
He
was the one who should have known better.”

“I wasn’t too young,” Chelsea countered.

“You think sixteen’s not too young?”

She hadn’t been sixteen, not the second time. Chelsea was silent for a moment, wondering how much to tell him. The truth? Why not? He was her husband, after all. Why not share her darkest, most dreadful secret with him?

She moistened her suddenly dry lips, wondering what he was going to say. “I wasn’t talking about the first time I had an affair with Bent,” she said.
“I was talking about the second. After he was married.”

Johnny was noticeably quiet.

“It was about five years ago,” she went on, “and I was working for my master’s degree. I hadn’t seen Bent in years, and I ran into him downtown. He looked almost exactly the same. It was weird, as if he’d time-warped through the past seven years. He told me he and his family had just moved to a house out in one of the W suburbs—Weston or Wayland or Wellesley, I don’t remember which. But because they weren’t living in town anymore, he’d gotten a small apartment near the courthouse for the times when he had trials and he wanted to stay overnight … and you know exactly where this is leading, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Disappointed in me?”

“Yeah.”

Chelsea squeezed her eyes shut. “Do you hate me now?”

“Of course not. Hell, everyone makes mistakes.”

“It wasn’t as tawdry as I’ve made it sound,” she told him. “I didn’t go to his apartment with him right away—not for a few weeks, anyway. But he
started calling me regularly, and we had lunch, and then dinner, and then …” She closed her eyes again, wondering what Johnny was really thinking. Sure, everyone made mistakes, but she’d knowingly slept with a married man. It had not been her finest moment.

“It
was
tawdry,” she admitted. “Unbearably tawdry. I only went there once, but once is enough, isn’t it? I guess I did it mostly to get back at Nicole—Bent’s wife. But she probably never knew, and
I
was the one who felt like crap afterward. Of course, it didn’t help matters that I was still in love with the bastard.” She took a deep breath. “So there it is. The one thing I’d do
much
differently if I could only do it over.”

“Maybe your mistake was in letting yourself fall in love with a man like Bent in the first place,” Johnny said quietly.

Chelsea snorted. “Yeah, like we can control who we fall in love with?” She sat up, letting the water out of the tub. “I’m turning into a prune. I’ve got to get out of here.” She stood up and stepped out of the tub.

“Are you still in love with him?”

His words stopped her. “I don’t know,” she
admitted. “I … haven’t been with that many men, if you want to know the truth. And I haven’t been with anybody who made me feel even close to the way Bent did.” Except Johnny. Those kisses Johnny had given her had been totally off the scale.

“That sounds like a challenge to me.” His voice was as soft as the towel she reached for to dry herself with.

“Well, it’s not. I don’t want to be someone’s challenge, or someone’s prize or someone’s bonus or—”

“How about someone’s partner?”

“There’s no such thing as a true partnership,” she told him as she dried herself off. “Someone always has more power. In everything from a business deal to a love affair. There’s always someone who wants more. And if you want something—or someone—too badly, you’re definitely in the weaker position.” Chelsea hung her towel up and reached for the moisturizing lotion on the counter next to the sinks. “That’s what happened with me and Bent—the first time around, I mean. I wanted to go out with this exciting, handsome, grown-up man—enough to get myself involved in a sexual relationship that I probably wasn’t ready for. And I ended up losing more than I bargained for—my
trust and innocence as well as my virginity. I’ve been careful ever since then never to want anyone that much.”

She tucked the phone between her shoulder and her chin as she squeezed some of the fragrant lotion into her hand. “Of course, that’s not so hard—I just compare anyone I meet to Bent. He was a remarkably talented lover. And I don’t necessarily mean in the physical sense, although he was no slouch in that department either. But I’m talking about presentation.”

“Presentation?”

“Yeah, he was romantic. He would take me places, treat me like an adult, order me champagne or wine with dinner. He took me to fancy hotels, treated me as if I were special. And for someone who was so damned selfish, he spent a huge amount of time
giving
pleasure. Sometimes I wish …”