The Unwanted (4 page)

Ed’s gaze drifted to the upstairs front window of the Winslows’ house as he thought about what Rosemary Winslow was doing right now. But he figured he knew, since Keith had gotten home from a four-day cruise just this morning.

He wondered what Rosemary did all those nights when Keith was gone. Sometimes, when he could see that she’d put the kid to bed, he’d thought maybe he ought to go over and keep her company for a while. Of course, so far he hadn’t actually done it, but that didn’t mean he never would. And if Laura didn’t like it, that would be just too damned bad.

Suddenly he became conscious of his son’s eyes on him, and he turned to see Eric staring at him, almost as if the boy
had been reading his thoughts. “You got a problem?” he demanded. Then his mouth twisted into an ugly leer. “You’re thinkin’ about Winslow’s daughter, huh? The one that’s comin’ from California tomorrow?” Eric, quickly shaking his head, turned away and started up the driveway toward the back door, but Ed merely raised his voice. “Well, you can forget about her, boy! I don’t want you gettin’ in trouble with any trashy little slut from California. You hear me?”

Once more Eric said nothing, but his shoulders hunched defensively, as if he could physically deflect his father’s words.

A moment later, with a last glance at the Winslows’ house, Ed followed his son up the drive. There was going to be trouble tonight. He could feel it coming. Either Eric or Laura was going to smart off, and he’d have to teach them a lesson. But that was all right. He’d had a lousy day anyway. He always felt better after he’d let off some steam.

From her regular post by the kitchen sink Laura Cavanaugh watched her husband and son come up the drive, and knew immediately that there was trouble. Ed’s face—always florid—was redder than usual, and Eric wore the expression of strained placidity that she had learned a long time ago to recognize as repressed anger.

What was it about this time? she wondered. Well, she would find out soon enough. She opened the oven door to give the spareribs a final basting, then pulled the salad out of the refrigerator and took it into the dining room, where the table was already set for dinner. She heard the screen door slam, and went back to the kitchen just as Ed and Eric came in from the service porch. Eric gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, and a moment later she heard him taking the stairs two at a time as he went up to his room. Ed dropped his lunch box on the counter, then started washing his hands at the kitchen sink. The muscles on his back rippled under his blue denim shirt.

Fifteen years ago she would have gone to him, slipped her arms around him and hugged him. But she knew what would happen if she tried that now. He would stiffen, then twist away from her, his eyes flashing with anger. Then, acting as if nothing had happened, he’d ask why dinner was
late, and before she could reply, he would settle into the breakfast nook and bury himself in the newspaper.

Unless Eric came back down.

If Eric came downstairs, Ed would put the paper aside and start rehashing every minute of Eric’s day with him. What had happened? Who had he had lunch with? How were his classes going? What had he done after school? What was he doing in the evening? Was he seeing Lisa Chambers?

And Eric, looking to Laura like a trapped animal, would do his best to give his father satisfactory answers. Except, as Laura was all too well aware, there were no satisfactory answers.

Now Ed turned away from the sink, dried his hands on one of the dish towels, then shoved his bulk into the breakfast nook. His eyes met hers, and his brows knit into a scowl. “Something wrong?” he asked.

Laura opened her mouth, then changed her mind, closed it and shook her head.

For a second she thought Ed was going to stand up again, but he merely reached out and pulled the newspaper over to the place in front of him. Breathing a silent sigh of relief, Laura turned back to the sink.

I should leave him, she told herself. I should take Eric and get out.

But, of course, she wouldn’t. There was no place for her to go. She was trapped, and there was no way out.

Besides, none of what had gone wrong for her family was Ed’s fault. She knew that—Ed reminded her of it almost every day, one way or another.

Everything that went wrong was her fault. Somehow, some way, she’d failed Ed. And having failed him, she couldn’t walk out on him.

But why did he always have to take it out on Eric too?

She’d tried to talk about it with him a few times, when he seemed to be in a particularly good mood, but he’d always insisted that he wasn’t being hard on the boy, that he was only giving Eric the guidance that a father owed to a son.

But Laura was certain there was more to it than that. Though Ed maintained that all he wanted was the best for Eric, Laura always had the distinct feeling that it was something
else, that it wasn’t just the normal desire of a man to see his son succeed.

It was as if her husband wanted to punish Eric. But she had never been able to discover the reason why.

Almost surreptitiously she found herself studying her husband. His hair—dark brown when she had first met him—was iron gray now, and the athlete’s body that had been his pride then had thickened over the last twenty years. His hands—the large hands that had once made her feel so safe when they held hers—were callused now, and the veins on their backs stood out, even under the thick mat of hair that started at his fingers and ran all the way up to his elbows. His face had been ruggedly handsome when he was in his twenties, but the years of drinking had blurred those sharp features, and there was a puffy looseness in the skin under his eyes.

So different from Eric, whose lithe body would never attain the mass of his father’s, and whose hands always struck Laura as being the hands of an artist or a musician. Not, of course, that Eric had ever tried any such thing, although Laura knew that sometimes, when he was by himself, Eric liked to draw. Several times she had found sketches in his room. Once she’d even thought about showing them to Ed.

She had quickly changed her mind, knowing how her husband felt about art: “Sissy way to make a living,” she remembered his saying as he’d sat in front of the television, drinking a beer while she watched a documentary about the life of Andrew Wyeth. “And even most of the good ones wind up starving.” So she’d put Eric’s sketches back in the drawer where she’d found them, and never mentioned them at all.

Eric’s face, too, was different from Ed’s. Where Ed’s handsomeness—while he’d still had it—had always been rugged, Eric’s face was sensitive, his blue eyes ringed with long black lashes, and his delicately chiseled features framed by an unruly mass of curly black hair which, when he was small, had been the bane of his existence. Even today Laura found it difficult to pass her son without running her hand through his hair.

Indeed, she sometimes wondered if it was Eric’s looks alone that make Ed ride him so hard. Perhaps, she sometimes
thought, if Eric had looked more like his dad, Ed wouldn’t have needed to mold him quite so strictly.

Suddenly her husband’s angry voice intruded on her reverie.

“It’s ten after six, Laura. Can’t you ever have dinner ready on time?”

Laura jumped at his voice, then hurriedly bent to open the oven. “I’ll start serving right away,” she promised. “H-how was your day? Did everything go all right? Did you get the engine fixed?”

Ed glared at her, his attention already drifting back to the sports page open in front of him. “If it went badly, I’d tell you, right? And no, I didn’t get the engine fixed. I had to spend most of the afternoon with the wholesaler, trying to soften him up to give me a decent price on the catch.”

Which means you sat in the Whaler’s Inn, drinking all afternoon, Laura thought as she began placing the ribs onto the three plates on the counter.

Silently she carried the plates into the dining room. Then, just as she was about to call upstairs to Eric, he appeared in the doorway that separated the dining room from the kitchen.

“Mom?” he asked, his voice low enough so that Laura knew he didn’t want his father to hear. “Can you talk to Dad? He wants me to go practice batting with him tonight, but I have to study.”

Laura stood still. Her eyes met her son’s. She could read the fear in them, and the shame he was feeling at asking for her help. She hesitated, then almost in spite of herself, shook her head.

“I can’t,” she said quietly. “If he’s made up his mind, I can’t change it. You know that.”

For a moment something flickered in Eric’s eyes, then it was gone. “Yeah,” he said finally. “Yeah, I know. Well, don’t worry, Mom. It’ll be all right—I’ll figure something out.”

A moment later Ed Cavanaugh came in and took his place at the head of the table. He waited silently until his wife and son had seated themselves. His eyes surveyed the dinner in front of him, then came to rest on them.

“I guess I can’t complain,” he said, his voice oozing with a stinging slime of vicious sarcasm. “A crappy house, a lazy
son, and a wife who can’t cook. What more could anyone want?”

Eric’s eyes flashed with anger as his mother winced at the lash of the words, but neither of them answered him, each silently hoping that when Ed started shouting, the neighbors wouldn’t hear him. But of course, they would—they always did—and though none of them ever said much, Laura and Eric always knew what they were thinking.

Eric always did his best simply to act as if nothing had happened, but for Laura the pitiful looks she always got from the neighbors—particularly from Rosemary Winslow—were almost as painful as her husband’s blows.

“If you don’t get started, you won’t make it,” Rosemary Winslow said, her eyes flicking to the clock on the wall. It was already after nine, but Keith didn’t seem the least bit worried. As she watched, he poured himself another cup of coffee and neatly folded
The Boston Globe
to the sports page. “Keith! Didn’t you hear me? This is not a fishing trip—you’re picking up your own daughter, and you can’t be late!”

“I won’t be late,” Keith replied, setting the paper aside. “It’s Saturday—there won’t be that much traffic.” He heard the sound of a screen door slamming next door, and glanced out the window to see Ed Cavanaugh starting down his driveway, his eyes bleary, his footsteps dragging. He gestured toward the window with his head, at the same time grinning wickedly at his wife. “Bet Laura doesn’t nag
him
the way you nag me.”

Rosemary’s eyes darkened as she remembered the sounds that had erupted from the Cavanaughs’ house late the night before. Though Ed’s yelling hadn’t been punctuated with any of Laura’s quickly stifled screams of pain, Rosemary was still certain the man had been slapping his family around again. Perhaps last night she should have given in to Keith’s desire to call the police. “It’s not funny,” she said, “and I wish you wouldn’t make jokes about it.”

From her place next to her father Jennifer, who had mercifully slept through the Cavanaughs’ argument, looked up from the little rivers of maple syrup she was dredging
through the scrambled eggs on her plate. “What’s not funny?” she demanded, her large eight-year-old’s eyes searching her parents’ faces.

“The way Mr. Cavanaugh treats his family,” Keith replied, his bantering tone suddenly gone. “And your mother’s right. I shouldn’t make jokes about it.”

“Oh,” Jennifer replied, immediately losing interest. Then, once more taking up an argument she’d lost earlier that morning but saw no point in abandoning, she turned to her mother. “How come I can’t go to Boston with Daddy to pick up Cassie?”

“I already told you, sweetheart,” Rosemary replied. She reached out to ruffle the red curls that capped Jennifer’s freckled face. “Cassie just lost her mother, and she won’t be feeling very good. We just think it would be easier for her if she didn’t have to deal with anyone but your daddy right away. Besides, you and I have a lot to do. We have to go shopping, then finish the bedroom. We want it to be ready for Cassie, don’t we?”

Jennifer’s face darkened and her lower lip quivered petulantly. “That was supposed to be my room,” she reminded her mother. “You promised me—”

“I know what I promised.” Rosemary sighed, wondering how to explain to an eight-year-old that promises sometimes had to be broken. “But that was before we knew Cassie was coming to live with us. And didn’t you decide it would be nicer to have a big sister than a bigger room?”

Jennifer hesitated, then decided not to answer the question at all. “But what if she doesn’t like me?”

“Of course she’ll like you, Punkin,” Keith told her. “What’s not to like? Just because you talk all the time, tend to be a little sassy, and kick and scream when you don’t get your way? What’s not to like?”

“I do not!” Jennifer protested. She was trying very hard to look indignant, but instead she dissolved into the giggles that always came over her when her father teased her. “And my name’s not Punkin, either. It’s Jennifer.”

“Right, Punkin,” Keith said. He slid off his chair just in time to avoid his younger daughter’s fist as she aimed it at his side. “Stop worrying—Cassie will like you.”

Jennifer’s giggles faded away, and suddenly her expression
became serious. “If she’ll like me, how come she never came to visit me? Doesn’t she like you?”

For a split second Keith’s eyes met his wife’s. Jennifer, they both realized, had just asked the question neither of them was willing to deal with.

Neither Rosemary nor Jennifer had ever met Cassie, and Keith himself hadn’t seen her for more years than he liked to admit. The last time he’d gone to California to see his daughter—until then an annual pilgrimage—the trip had turned into a disaster. His first wife, Diana, had been divorced for the second time by then, and she seemed to blame the failure of her second marriage—as well as her first—squarely on Keith.

“I don’t want to see you,” she’d told Keith on the phone. “I don’t suppose I can stop you from seeing Cassie, but I don’t have to see you myself.”

“But why?” Keith had demanded. “What did I do?”

“Tommy left me,” she’d said bitterly. “He left me because I couldn’t trust him, couldn’t let myself depend on him. And that’s your fault. Thanks to you, I can’t trust anybody.”