A Summer in Sonoma (25 page)

Joe just kept working. “Yeah? Bug off.”

“It's something you don't want to talk about, which usually means you should get it out of your gut before you punch someone.”

Joe straightened. “You wanna be first?”

“Whew. That bad, huh? No one ever feels like hitting me!”

“And why's that, pretty boy?”

“Because I'm sweet,” he answered with a grin. “Ask Jules.”

Joe went back to wiping, shining. “Well, you might find out more about this by asking Jules,” he said.

“Well, that can only mean one thing. Marty. But Jules hasn't said anything. Those girls—they never shut up when you want 'em quiet, but if you'd like to know something, they're pretty tight-lipped. You wanna pout and piss everyone off, or you wanna get it off your chest?”

He straightened again. “I don't know what it is,” he said, frowning. “She's got a bug up her ass about something.”

“You ask her?”

“I don't exactly have to ask her,” he said meanly. “All she does is bitch. She doesn't like anything. It's like she wants me to be waiting at the door in my negligee with a glass of wine in my hand when she gets home, or something like that. I can't do anything right.”

“Been there,” Billy laughed.

“Yeah?”

“Oh, yeah. The last time I couldn't do anything right, Jules was pregnant, for the fourth time. The one we lost—you know.”

Joe ran a hand through his thick, black hair. “Whoa. Think Marty could be—”

“Well, hell, Joe, how would I know? You're the only one who'd know that!”

“Yeah, but Jules…she do anything really crazy?”

“Like…?”

“Like move out of the bedroom?”

That one hit Billy hard. It almost made him take a step back. He thought things had been bad there for a while, but if Julie had moved out of their bed, out of their bedroom, he'd have thought it was the end. Through the worst of their problems—and they hadn't been small—they'd always spent what sleep time they had together in the same bed, usually holding each other on and off all night.

“Holy shit, Joe—that's not good,” he said glumly.

“Tell me about it.” He went back to polishing.

“Moved out of the bedroom?”

“Down the hall. First it was just the makeup and hair dryer, then it was the stuff in her closet and drawers. It's like she's gone. I don't know what game this is—”

“Joe,” Billy said, putting a hand on his shoulder. “Joe, this isn't a game. You better figure out what's going on. She's moving away. You don't have that much time.”

“How can she do that? We took an oath!”

“Yeah, well, if you think the oath is gonna hold you together, you're dreaming. The oath is about you holding
each other
together. Listen, can I tell you something? It's private. Not for any other ears.”

“It's up to you,” he said with a shrug. “I don't talk, you know that.”

“But I don't know how much of this the girlfriends even know.”

“Well, none of the girlfriends are talking to me right
now,” he said with a pout and a scuffle of one foot. “Not even the one I married.”

“Okay, I don't know if this'll help you or not, but when Jules was hating me, it wasn't just about being pregnant. She was afraid to have another kid, because money's just so damn tight.”

“Listen, the first years at F.D., with a family, it's not that easy….”

“Yeah, yeah—that's not half of it. What I wanna tell you is Jules complained about how hard the money situation was for at least two years. Know how I handled it? I tried to cheer her up, get her to think positive. What I should've done is listened to what she was saying, ask her to be more specific, detailed. But I was so damn busy, working all the time, trying to throw money at the problem. And maybe just a little pissed at her for not being grateful for my hard work and great attitude. Joe, she'd been talking the whole time and I'd been telling her to
relax,
everything would be fine. She was
scared
to have our baby. It took getting right up against bankruptcy and having a professional look over the bills to get my attention. He said Jules had to be a genius to keep us from starving for so long.”

Joe grabbed Billy's biceps and gave a squeeze, his expression earnest and sympathetic. “God, Billy, I didn't know it was that tough at your place….”

“I didn't tell you that to get sympathy, Joe. We're getting straightened out. What I'm trying to tell you is my wife was
talking
and I wasn't
listening
. You ever tell Marty to just relax? When she bitches about some
thing—you ever tell her to just cool down and relax? Maybe tell her that her attitude is half the problem?”

“What else you gonna do?” He shrugged.

“That's the way I saw it, too. What's she bitching about? You have any recollection?”

“Name it,” he said with frustration. “She hates football, for one thing, and we're just now coming in the season. She wants work done around the house—I
kill
myself around the house! There's no better-looking yard, cars, boat or garage on the street! Everything's perfect! She wants
dates.
What the hell is that? Why would you date someone you're married to? And she hates my shorts! They're comfortable shorts. I don't tell her what to wear—”

“Yeah, but Marty looks damn good, and you don't mind that….”

“It's like she just hates everything about
me,
” he said. “What am I gonna do about that? Plus, instead of staying home like she usually does, she's been going out with the girls.”

“What girls?”

“Our girls, I guess.”

Julie hadn't been going out. Billy had a sense of cold dread pass through him. He thought maybe his best friend's marriage was on the skids. “Okay, do this,” he said. “You ever have a chance to talk to her? I mean, just you two?”

“She says she's all done talking to me, and it feels like she means it,” he said.

“Try this,” Billy said. “Ask her what you should do
to start getting her back. Tell her to make it easy because you're a blockhead and you just don't get it. Ask for one specific thing at a time—real simple. Then do it. It's gotta be easier than this!”

“Aw, Jesus, she's just going to ask something totally ridiculous….”

“Joe! Would you get rid of the comfortable shorts if that was the price of having her back in the bedroom? Would you turn off the football game and meet her at the door in one of her negligees with a glass of wine?”

“I'd probably meet her at the door in a fluorescent jockstrap with my ears on fire. You have any idea how long it's been since I've been laid?”

Billy smiled. He thought he might have just gotten a glimmer of Marty's problem. Joe was a good-hearted guy, but he was long on machismo and short on patience. “You ever have to work at that before you were actually married?”

“Look, you take the vows, you seal the deal. You bring home a good paycheck and do your work around the house, and the begging should end there!”

Billy laughed at him. He put his hands in his pockets. “Man, you don't know anything about women. Joe, you don't stop romancing your wife the day after the wedding. What's she gonna think? She'll think you don't love her, don't want her, don't care…”

“She knows I want her,” he said with a pout. “She can't help but know it.”

“Yeah, but I bet you used to want her in a way that had you doing anything to make her happy. Oh, man,
you better find out what she needs from you. Then you better get ready to turn off the game and get out the fluorescent jockstrap. Whatever it takes, buddy,” he said. “I mean, if you want this to work. I dunno…maybe you don't really care that much—”

“I want her back where she belongs.”

Where she
belongs.
He had a real property thing going on. “Take my advice, pal. Let her tame you. Let her domesticate you. Let her tell you what she wants and give it to her. It's a totally whipped life—and it's fucking fantastic.”

“Sounds like you're saying the secret to happiness is letting the woman run things,” Joe said, surly.

“Joe, she's already running things—she moved out of the bedroom. Aren't you paying attention? Trust me, you give her whatever she needs, she'll not only be your girl again, she'll probably treat you like the king you stupidly think you are.”

“I think you're full of shit,” Joe said.

“Yeah? Well, I've known Marty a long time—about twenty years now. And usually her problem is not expecting enough, not asking too much. I remember her dating guys who walked all over her before she finally moved on.”

“I never did that,” Joe said.

“I know—she said you were a prince. You still a prince now, Joe?” Billy asked, lifting his eyebrows. He shook his head. “Hey, I didn't take my own advice a couple of years, and I paid for not listening, believe me. But my wife never moved down the hall. Have it your way. Good luck.”

Billy could see that Joe was preoccupied—sulky and quiet—all through dinner. When they were at the firehouse between calls, he was serious and thoughtful, not his usual active and playful self. But maybe he was thinking about things, about what he could do.

Billy sure wished he'd listened to Jules. Maybe he'd have gathered up all those bills sooner, gotten that monkey off her back, accidentally gotten advice quicker. John's words—
Your marriage and family is your greatest asset
—kept ringing in his head. He knew that, he felt that, but it was still hard for him to figure out how you kept that asset safe when all the less important obligations had bigger hammers.

When he got home in the morning, he found Jules in the kitchen, making a list with her morning coffee. He gave her a kiss and said, “What's up with Marty and Joe? He says she moved out of the bedroom.”

“She
did?
” she asked, shocked. “I had no idea it had gotten that bad!”

“He's been loaded for bear all week. I just got that out of him last night. What's up? Tell me—I want to know if the advice I gave him is worth a damn.”

“Well, she's had a few complaints lately. Starting with, he won't shower or shave before bed and just rolls over on top of her, like she's a blow-up doll. She says foreplay at her house is, ‘You awake?'”

“Oh, man. How does that not surprise me?”

“What advice did you give him?”

“I told him to listen to his wife. Advice I should've taken a long time ago.”

 

When Beth was a week post-op and moving around comfortably, Cassie told her, “It's time. We have to tell the girls.”

“Okay, I can do that,” she said. “And then I have to go over to my parents' house. I've been putting this off for when I can go to them, when I'm pretty close to a hundred percent. I know they mean well, but I don't want them trying to help me out over here.” She took a breath. “I just dread getting sick and weak from chemo and having them trying to prop me up. I sound like a serpent's tooth, don't I?”

“Nah, I understand. I saw them in action growing up. You can handle them any way you like and I'll even run interference for you if I can. But I want you to call the girls….”

She called Julie and Marty at five and five-thirty. By seven they were both at Beth's, sitting in her small living room with her, getting the details.

“If you don't want to talk about this, it's okay, but are you getting a prognosis?”

“According to the doctor, it's good,” she said. “It's kind of hard to accept that when you're facing it the second time, but I understand the theory. When breast cancer spreads, the first sites are most often the lymph system, lungs, spine, et cetera. They're treating this as another primary site—a brand-new cancer that we got to early. The surgery was superaggressive, and so is the chemo, but it's what I agreed to do. Kill this bastard before it can kill me. It appears I could be prone to breast
cancer, but there's no indication I'm prone to all types of cancer.”

“Are you scared?” Marty asked.

“Yeah. But more angry than scared. It would really piss me off to have worked this hard for my M.D., my OB-Gyn certification, only to die in my early thirties before I really get to experience it. If I'd known this was coming, I might've just traveled or something. Played with dolphins, maybe. Done less taxing things that were more soothing and comforting.”

“But didn't you always want this?” Jules asked her. “To be a doctor?”

“I guess I did, but I didn't know it for a while. I like a difficult study, a big challenge. I'm such a nerd. When I started med school, I thought I'd end up in research like my dad, but I'm good with people, whereas my parents are more solitary, bookwormish intellectuals. But when I did my OB rotation, it found me. I was hooked right away. I fell in love. It's funny—a woman who loves delivering babies but might never have one. Make that probably—will probably never have one.”

“But why couldn't you tell us?”

Beth looked down and shrugged. “It was about me, not you. The last time was so awful, with everyone running to me as if my days were numbered. And then, as if to prove they probably were, Mark left me. It was like being branded, like having the pox or something. For a while after Mark left, I believed I was going to die. You can't get well thinking that way. I wanted to avoid that. I've been trying to treat it like a condition, not a disease,
something I have to deal with and then can let go. I guess it's not going to be quite that simple, but still…” She looked up at her best friends. “I just wanted to have a normal life. But that keeps sliding away from me.”