Sweet Love (22 page)

Which is right . . . now.

“The earliest I can get you in,” the receptionist informs me, “is Thursday at one.”

“Thursday at one? I can’t wait until Thursday at one. I’ll be clinically insane with worry by then.”

“You better take it,” she says. “I’ve got three other people on hold who will if you don’t.”

I take it.

Man. I am so tired of being yanked around, I groan, hanging up the phone with a slam. I get yanked around at work, by Arnie, by Kirk Bledsoe, even at C-Rite.

How come whatever
I
want gets a low priority? Even Em, though the greatest teenager ever, still leaves her stuff around like I’m the maid and she just expects me to do her bidding. Does scolding her about her discarded yogurt tops and piles of dirty clothes do any good? No.

Look. There are her gum wrappers on the couch. Five of them. Does she expect them to walk themselves to the trash? Guess so, because here I am once again cleaning up after her. Tossing them into the wastepaper basket under the sink, I give the door a good hard kick when I’m done. And is this her strawberry shortcake bowl left over from last night still on the dining room table sticky hard with dried whipped cream?

I throw the bowl into the sink so hard it almost breaks. Then I dump her socks—still holding the shape of Em’s foot—into the hamper and slam the hamper lid. For good measure I give the bathroom door a hard slam, too, on my way out. It feels terrific. I might slam every door in the house.

Nothing. I’m (slam!) nothing to anyone. Only a doormat. (Slam and slam!) I can’t even get a doctor’s appointment (slam!) when I want to. I have to wait (slam!) and wait (slam!) and wait (slam!).

There is a knock on the front door. “Julie!” Mom calls. “Are you okay?”

My father picked up Mom from Lois’s house on his way home from Maine last night. I had to bite my tongue when I discovered he let her make dinner—despite her condition. The good news is he let Em and me borrow his car so we could drive out to Lexington with a new spare and fetch mine.

But the bad news? I can’t tell her about the lump. That’s the last thing she needs to worry about on top of everything else.

“I’m okay,” I tell her. “Just pissed.”

“Well, keep it down. You’re so loud your father can’t hear the
Today
show.”

That’s it. That’s the final straw. “The
Today
show!” I yell, throwing open the door to find her still in that hideous pink quilted housecoat. “He shouldn’t be watching that junk. Anyway, why doesn’t he tell me himself? Why does he always get you to do his dirty work? He lets you make dinner, lets you stay at Lois’s house while you recover from a collapse, and he has enough nerve to ask me to keep it down?”

Mom’s wrinkled lips press into a hard line, a sure sign that she’s hurt‚ and immediately I wish I could take it back. But I don’t want to.

“Listen,” she starts in, jabbing me with her bony finger. “I don’t know what’s gotten into you lately. Ever since yesterday you’ve been a pill to put up with. As if I don’t have enough problems.”

“I’m sorry, Mom. I didn’t mean to upset you. It’s just that—”

“You meant it. I know what you think of me and lemme tell you something, kiddo, you don’t know squat.” Her eyes are watering and her cheeks are getting red and I’m afraid she’s going to keel over again. “What goes on between your father and me is our business. It works for us and we’ve got fifty years of marriage to back us up. So why don’t you keep your bossy trap shut.”

She doesn’t say it, but I know what she’s thinking. For someone whose marriage lasted all of two years, I’m not one to be sitting in judgment. That’s rich coming from a woman who never had a career but who never hesitates to give me career advice.

“Look, Mom,” I say, trying to keep it cool and not doing a very good job. “You have no idea what I’m going through.
No
idea. You’ve never had to be a single mother
and
worry about how to pay the bills. You’ve always been taken care of by a man.”

I’m really on a roll now. I’m feeling self-destructive like a thresher out of control cutting down everything in its path. “So pardon me if I slam a few doors. A few slammed doors seem like a small price to pay for what I’m going through. And if you don’t like that, you can butt out.”

“Fine,” she says‚ stepping away, disgust written all over her face. “If that’s what you want, it can be arranged. I’ll butt out of your life, you butt out of mine. Though you might want to consider that daughter of yours. She doesn’t have a choice. She’s stuck with you and your foul moods.”

There is a momentary exchange of glares and then she goes and I slam the door feeling guilty as well as angry now. “Too bad,” I murmur, though loud enough for Em, who’s standing in the doorway, to hear.

“What?” I snap.

“What?” She throws up her hands. “You’re in a shouting match with Grandma and you want to know
what
? How am I supposed to sleep with all this racket?”

“Well, maybe you ought to try waking up before noon.”

“It’s not anywhere close to noon. Grandma’s right. What
is
wrong with you?”

I hadn’t intended to tell Em. Honest. My plan was to get this checked out and then, if everything came back fine, to never speak of it again. But here she is, a half-grown woman, and here I am, acting like a baby, and it hits me that this is not the kind of cloud I can live under without her taking stock.

“I found a lump.”

There. I said it.

“In my breast.”

“Oh.” Em stares straight at my chest. “Which one?”

Putting my hand on “the spot,” I say, “Left. Upper-left-hand quadrant.”

“Most common place.”

“Yes.” I’m impressed. She must have been reading up.

“That’s a bummer,” she says, leaning against the door. “What are you going to do about it?”

It’s a relief Em’s taking this so well. I’d have expected she’d be wailing and worrying about the “what-ifs” by now. “I called the doctor this morning and they said they can’t see me until Thursday. Which means I probably won’t get a mammogram until next week. Hence my slamming doors.”

“And that’s that—you slam a few doors? Isn’t there another doctor? Isn’t there someplace else you can go?”

“I don’t think so. I’m on an HMO. I need her approval before I can take the next step. It’s complicated. Adult stuff.”

“Let me get this straight.” Em folds her arms, a simple gesture that turns her normally whimsical figure womanly. “You’re always telling me to stand up for myself and fight for what’s really important. But then you find a lump and you know that Grandma had breast cancer and her mother before her and her mother before her and you’re just going to wait? How fucked up is that?”

The swear catches me off guard, but she’s right. Moreover, so is Mom. I’ve got to be the role model here. Even if I can’t get in to see my doctor before Thursday, I’ve at least got to show Em I tried.

Without saying a word, I go over to the phone and press redial. The receptionist answers on the third ring and asks if she can put me on hold.

“No, thank you,” I answer as politely as possible. “I need to speak to Dr. Foulk now.”

“Dr. Foulk’s with a patient. She won’t be returning phone calls until three. Is this an emergency?”

Okay, I want to cave. I’ll wait until three. But there’s Em on the couch, studying me, watching every move, thinking no doubt about how she’ll react when she finds a lump. If she will slam doors and vent her frustration on her family instead of the medical establishment. If she will belittle and berate me, her mother.

“Yes,” I say, “it’s an emergency.”

Em gives me the thumbs-up.

The receptionist sighs. I know she wants to ask me the nature of my emergency and all sorts of nosy questions. I don’t let her, though. I ask her to get Dr. Foulk now.

When Dr. Foulk gets on, she is slightly clipped and professional. Two sentences into my description of what I’ve found, however, and she’s scolding the receptionist for making me wait until Thursday.

Turns out, all I need from her is a prescription to get a mammogram and she can fax one over to the breast-imaging center within the next few minutes. She even goes so far as to say she’ll call them right away and make sure I get in tomorrow.

“With your family history,” she says, “you don’t mess around, Julie, though I’m sure it’s fine. Ninety percent of all lumps are benign.”

“So everyone keeps telling me.”

I thank her and hang up, choked with fresh emotion at the sight of my daughter—my beautiful, strong and oh-so-smart daughter—looking up at me victoriously.

“Emmaline,” I say, trying not to cry. “You might have just saved my life.”

“And for that you’re going to hug me, right? No cash? No car? No all-expense -paid trip to Europe?”

“A car, you can buy anytime,” I say, throwing myself on the couch and wrapping my arms around her. “But a mother’s love . . .”

“Free.”

Chapter Seventeen

...
those that are betray’d Do feel the treason sharply, yet the traitor Stands in worse case of woe.

— CYMBELINE, ACT III, SCENE 4

Later that night, while lying in bed trying not to let my mind drift to Michael or my hand drift to the upper-left quadrant of my breast, I have an epiphany: Max the homeless man. Of course! Why didn’t I ask him before?

I’ve seen a lot of Max lately, partly because I’ve been eager for any excuse not to go to work, where I’ll only be relegated to the basement. We’ve finished “Tintern Abbey” and moved on to other brief, occasionally rambling discussions about Shakespeare (Michael’s influence). But mostly we’ve been dishing dessert.

It started with the peach cobbler and, ever since, Max has asked me if I have a “taste treat” to go with the dollar or two I hand him each morning for opening the Davis Square T station door. A muffin, a chocolate croissant, once some almond biscotti tiramisu—that’s what I usually bring. He’s a recovering alcoholic, he’s told me, and like a lot of recovering alcoholics he craves the sugar that used to come with his wine and rum.

He also didn’t just quit his investment banker job, as Michael had said. He was fired. As for the Back Bay town house, that, too, is a myth. It was more like he had a tiny Cape in Westwood from which he was booted by a wife fed up with his addiction. Now he’s on the streets, sober—or so he says—for three years, immersing himself in library books to escape the demons that poke and prod him to go back to the bottle.

And yet for all our exchanges, it never occurred to me that, being a virtual resident of the Somerville Public Library, Max might have been a witness to the abduction of Amy Michak.

This is why, on the morning of my mammogram, I bound out of the T and make a beeline for Max’s old haunts. He’s not by the subway door or at the coffee shop or Woolworth’s. He’s not huddled with his friends in one of the other T entrances. When I do find him, he’s relieving himself against the wall of an abandoned garage.

“Oh, sorry.” Slinking back in embarrassment, I avert my eyes.

“Got to do it somewhere. Try to be as out of the way as possible,” he says, zipping up his fly and gesturing to a newspaper lying at his feet. “Just read about you in the
Phoenix
. They won’t give you a break for that Michak bullshit, will they?”

Exactly what I came here to ask him about. “Do you know about the Michak case?”

“Naturally.” He bristles, insulted. “I don’t just read books. I read the papers. That’s one thing there’s no shortage of at a T station.”

If he knows, then . . . well, I’d better ask him. “And what’s your take on that murder?”

Max reaches down to wipe his hands on a discarded McDonald’s napkin. “What’s my take? My take is that the police aren’t looking very hard.”

“And why’s that?”

“Why are you asking me?”

“Because you practically live at the Somerville Library, where Amy Michak was last seen alive.”

He gives me a dirty look and starts walking, picking up cans and throwing them into a plastic Shaw’s bag, toeing foil gum wrappers smashed on the sidewalk with the faint hope they might be change. “I was there that night,” he says at last.

I knew it. “You see anything?”

“Yup.” Pausing in front of a community garbage can, he reaches in and fishes around, his eyes closed as he lets his mind wander.

This is frustrating. My instinct is to shake him and make him talk, but he’s getting too much attention from me to answer quickly. “Can you describe what you saw?”

“Yup.” From the garbage can he removes an almost spent legal pad, one white page barely clinging on. “Got a writing implement?”

I fish a pen from my purse and he immediately begins to draw. As he proceeds to brag about his innate aptitude as an artist, a figure emerges beneath his hand. Its familiar stoop and potbelly, the bald dome, and goatee send chills down my spine.

My first thought is, another tragedy for Rhonda. I think that makes three.

“That was who she walked out with.” Max thumps the pad with his forefinger. “I’d bet my life.”

“Are you sure?”

“Never more so.”

This is so not the outcome I wanted.

“Did you tell this to the police?” I ask.

A corner of his lip curls. “No, dear. They never asked me if I saw someone. They asked me if I did it. Don’t you see? I’m nobody. I am the scum o’ the earth.”

Again I examine the drawing, mesmerized by how accurately Max captured the personality as well as the physical form. That’s the mark of a true artist, isn’t it? To be able to convey a person’s
je ne sais quoi.

“Do you know who this is?” I say.

“Yes, dear,” Max says. “ ‘A little more than kin, and less than kind.’ ”

Hamlet speaking of his uncle Claudius.

Max is definitely no ordinary bum.

It’s while I’m closing out my third conversation of the morning with Detective Sinesky from the Somerville Police Department that Arnie barges into my basement prison all aflutter.