The Summer of Good Intentions (4 page)

And then there was Jess.
Poor Jess
, as Virgie thought of her, practically one word:
poorjess
. As far as she could tell, Jess's life was a mess. Every time Virgie called, Jess was either coming from or going to work. The kids were constantly shouting in the background. And Tim (such a bland guy when Jess first married him) had not, alas, turned out to be any more interesting over the years. And, honestly, how interesting could an accountant be? Like warm milk, Tim was comforting at first but turned sour when left to sit too long. No, Virgie had learned from her sisters' mistakes. She would marry when the time was right, when
the guy
was right.

She pounded out four miles, then showered and dried off. In the mirror, she could see the jeweled flecks of cellulite where her toned thighs used to be. The small creases hovering above her nose, once obvious only when she scowled, had become deeper, permanent fixtures. Even the parentheses around her mouth had grown more pronounced in the last few months. Unlike the women she read about in magazines who claimed to have worse self-images than were actually warranted, Virgie had the opposite problem: she had an inflated self-image. She thought she looked better than she actually did.
Shit
.

She'd have to book her next Botox appointment soon.

She got dressed, dried her hair, and quickly applied a faint blush and mascara. She wasn't going to let a few jiggly bits and lines stop her today. She had Jackson to meet! How he had managed to make his way into her heart so soon and so easily, she couldn't fathom. He was a little bit geeky after all—a nurse who could perform metric conversions in his head. Not one iota like the guys she usually dated, a sea of bankers and stockbrokers with egos that matched the size of their wallets. But that's what made Jackson so refreshing. She didn't have to get dolled up to see him. She could just
be,
and it felt strangely, wonderfully liberating.

She walked the few short blocks across town and ducked over to the street with Romeo's. When she got a glimpse of Jackson through the restaurant's paned glass doors, she smiled. There was his tousled brown hair, his tanned skin, his khaki pants, and a blue shirt that she knew without looking highlighted his blue eyes, a shade of seaglass, above a slightly hooked nose. Just seeing him made her relax, a tight coil sprung.

As she drew closer, he turned to her and his smile lit up. He pushed open the door and said, “Right on time. I like that in a woman.”

“Hi there, stranger,” she said, though it had been fewer than twelve hours since they'd been curled up together in her bed. His hand touched her on the back, gently guiding her forward, and sending a small shiver up her spine. The bad taste of the afternoon's events began to slip away. In fact, she didn't know if she'd even bother telling Jackson how shabbily Larry had treated her. Why spoil an otherwise promising evening? They followed their hostess to a table in the back near a window looking out over the bay. The evening sun glinted off the water in slender shards of light.

“Ah, perfect,” Jackson said, pulling out her chair. Virgie was thinking exactly the same thing as she sat down and unfolded the crisp white napkin in her lap.

For a few hours at least, she could stop worrying about what she didn't have and enjoy what she did.

Jess placed a folded pair of Superman underpants on the laundry pile as Tim walked into the family room. She was finishing packing for the trip tomorrow. A crime show played on the television, and a glass of white wine sat on the coffee table. After much pleading to stay up late, the kids were finally tucked into bed and asleep.

Even though she knew it wasn't necessary, Jess still lay down with Teddy at bedtime, waiting for his short breaths to register the slow, even cadence of sleep. She couldn't help it; she loved their late-night talks before he drifted off. Tonight everything had centered on what they would do at the Pilgrim house, as he called it. Now that he was four, he could anticipate his time on the Cape, and excitement radiated from his small body like sound waves. He worshiped Luke especially, who was a year older and, therefore, the ultimate of cool.

Seven-year-old Grace had fallen asleep first tonight, exhausted from a day of swimming with her friends. Her curly brown hair spilled over her pillow. She and Teddy still shared a room, but Jess knew that sooner or later they would need to clear out the home office and reconfigure it into a bedroom for Grace. Right now the kids were so close, it was as near perfect as it would ever be. It made her wish that she could freeze time, keep her children right where they were.

She sipped her wine and watched while a forensics officer culled evidence at a crime scene. Somewhere, on the periphery, she registered that Tim had sat down next to her, a beer in hand. Had he sighed as he sank into the worn red cushions?

“Finished packing?” he asked, without making a move toward the pile of rumpled clothes in the basket.

“Almost,” she said. “Just a few more things I had to wash.” She focused on the show, not looking at him. In the past year, Jess had given up trying to get her husband to help. After nine years of marriage, she'd begun to suspect that Tim was not her soul mate after all. If someone asked her to put her finger on when things started to go wrong, she would be hard-pressed to say. The troubles in her marriage felt like a snowball that had been building over the last year, a hard icy little ball that had turned into a boulder tumbling downhill. They had tried counseling, but each session only succeeded in pushing her husband further away. Tim didn't think their marriage was unraveling. In his mind, Jess was making a big deal out of nothing. He worked hard; she worked hard; they had two great kids.
The American Dream
. When she pointed out that they hardly spoke to each other anymore, he stared at her blankly. Their therapist removed her glasses and pinched her nose, as if listening to them gave her a headache.

And so now, more often than not, they left Post-it notes for each other. It began as a way of communicating when their schedules required hurried exchanges. She would hand off the kids to Tim as she headed out to night school for her master's. On the refrigerator, she would leave notes:
Brush kids' teeth; don't forget bedtime story; put wash in dryer, please!
But when graduate school ended, the Post-it notes continued and the
please
s and
thank you
s fell away. “Why do you and Daddy leave so many notes for each other?” Grace asked over dinner one night when Tim wasn't home. Jess was torn. Should she tell the truth and say that she and Daddy communicated best by Post-its, or should she pretend it was a game? She opted for the latter.

“We like to leave little messages. Like a treat. You know, like when I put a note in your lunch box that says ‘I love you.' ” But even Grace appeared unconvinced, her delicate eyebrows arched into tiny upside-down Vs.

How had it come to this? Jess asked herself this question often, maybe twenty times a day. She'd be talking with a student about her failing grades and suddenly a little alarm would go off in her head:
Warning! Marriage in trouble!
She never thought they would be one of those couples who needed therapy. It had taken arm-twisting, cajoling to get Tim to the counselor, and after eight sessions, the therapist admitted even she couldn't help until Tim was willing to admit there was a problem. Tim rested his hands in his lap, his fingers tightly steepled. And so they'd tabled the discussion.
To be continued,
thought Jess.

Now when she cast a glance his way, she saw that her husband's shirt strained against his waistband, his belly plunging over. On nights when he missed dinner, he was more often than not out with his buddies, drinking. His sandy blond hair, which had been thick when they first met, had thinned considerably. And while it had never bothered Jess before that her husband was on the shorter side, it did now. It was as if his body had grown out of proportion, a lopsided tree, his top heavier than the bottom.

Sometimes she wondered if she gave him a little push, would he topple off balance?

That Tim did little to ignite passion in her these days could hardly be considered a fault. Married couples, she understood, eventually reached a certain comfort level where emotions found their balance, like groundwater settling at its natural level. When she first met Tim in a bar in South Boston, he had been sweet, handsome, a cut above the rest. The two big dimples that danced on either side of his grin immediately caught her eye. He told her he'd majored in literature, but his day job was accounting. She was charmed. A literature major who made money? It struck her as a win-win: they could discuss Shakespeare while they counted their hundreds in bed! The courtship sparked quickly. Was it because she'd never had a serious boyfriend in college? Or was she simply flattered that someone was finally interested in her and not in her more beautiful twin, Maggie?

Of course, Maggie was married by then. But still.

They married in Boston's Trinity Church on a balmy spring day with three hundred guests in attendance. Jess's mom had spent two years planning and organizing, right down to the lavish bouquets of white calla lilies that arched like swans' necks across the aisles. Jess's wedding would
not
be the slipshod affair that Maggie's had been, if their mother had anything to say about it. Maggie and Mac had insisted on a small, informal family gathering at the Cape house, and Gloria Herington seemed to interpret her oldest daughter's decision as a personal slight. Well, she'd made up for it in spades when it came to planning Jess and Tim's big day.

Lately, though, Jess felt a distinct prick of dissatisfaction whenever she shared a room with her husband. There was such a vast disconnect between the way she had imagined her life would be—one filled with passion, heady discussions, a surplus of cash—and the way it had turned out. Sometimes it startled her, and she felt sick to her stomach. She couldn't recall the last time Tim had picked up a book or suggested they see a movie. His desk at home was a mountain of spreadsheets. Where were the trips to the museum or the symphony? The dinner parties with friends? The vacations they'd dream up on lazy Sunday mornings in bed, the paper strewn about the sheets after they'd made love?

“You talked to Nancy? They're moving out the end of the month.” Tim interrupted her thoughts.

Jess sighed. “Yes. It's too bad. They're good kids.”

Tim sipped his beer. “We'll have to find some new tenants.”

“Yes.” Her voice grated. She understood why the couple who lived upstairs, both students at Northeastern, was moving out. They needed to live closer to campus. But the news delivered earlier this morning had dropped like a plate on her foot. It would fall to Jess to find new tenants—and soon. One more thing to add to her never-ending to-do list. Add it to the microwave that still awaited fixing. And the ice dispenser in the fridge that made little clicking noises but no ice.

She longed for a free night when she could climb up to their bedroom, crawl into bed, and read for an hour uninterrupted. No laundry to fold, no bills to pay. The truth of it was, though, that by the time Teddy fell asleep, Jess was completely drained. And while school work always slowed down during the summer months, Jess still had responsibilities. There was a small group of summer students that needed tending to and a host of discipline and scheduling issues that inevitably crept up.

“So, how was your day?” Tim asked.

She knew she should count it as a victory that her husband was asking her this one small question, a question he'd been unable to ask her over dinner because he was not yet home. That it was not written on a Post-it note. She considered giving a thoughtful reply, but then stopped herself. They were beyond that. To tell him that, at work, she'd had to break up a fight between two girls and only barely missed getting punched herself, seemed beside the point. Or, to tell him the sillier, but equally depressing thought that she'd noticed her thighs were touching again, which surely meant she'd gained back all the weight she'd struggled to lose last fall, was similarly out of the question. No, they were beyond that. Tim didn't expect a real answer.

“Fine,” she said instead. She shook out his cotton button-down shirt, advertised as wrinkle-free in the catalog but irritatingly crinkled in her hands now.

“Mmm,” he uttered.

“I thought we could shoot for leaving around ten tomorrow morning. What do you think?” She was trying her best to act civil, normal. She was hoping against all hope that she might get her marriage back this vacation. That something would change in her, in Tim.
Something
. A magic spell, perhaps, that the sun and the beach air might cast upon them, melting the deep freeze of their marriage.

“Sure.” He rested his feet on the coffee table and reached for the clicker.
Did the man really have nothing to do before they left tomorrow for two weeks of vacation?
Jess studied her to-do list, which had at least ten uncrossed items on it.