Funny Once (10 page)

Lovey got out the chocolate candy, the surefire solution, a small pile of M&M’s for Celia to take solace in. “Is there enough for me?” Caleb asked.

“Not really,” Lovey said. “Just the one snack bag. I have raisins.”

“No thanks,” he sighed. Raisins: that was his lot in life.

Even after her second bottle, the baby was not satisfied. Bernadette had predicted four
a.m
., and here it was. Lovey texted her and got no reply.

“There’s formula in the bag,” Caleb told her, and then proceeded to fix a bottle of it, studying the ounces on the measuring cup, leveling the powder with a knife on the scoop. It made Lovey sad to see him shake up the concoction before microwaving it, and sadder still to watch him test its temperature on his wrist.

A text arrived from Bernadette:
Found him, heading home!

Everybody fine here
, Lovey wrote back. The beauty of texting: no telltale soundtrack. For the kitchen was loud, both girls miserable, the chocolate gone, the formula apparently not to the baby’s taste. She wanted the real thing, from the real source.

“Hey there,” William announced himself, hair mashed flat against his cheek, shirtless and in P.E. shorts, which always reminded Lovey that her first husband would never appear in public without a shirt, or wearing shorts, without his hair combed, he was vain about his body, his age, his aging body. In her dream, had he been nude like the others in the burning building? At night he took to bed with him an apple, so that he could freshen his breath with a bite first thing in the morning. William gave Lovey a perfunctory stale-smelling peck on the cheek, “What’s all the hubbub, bub?” he asked the three-year-old as he stepped over her to get to the coffeemaker.

The child swung her arm out to hit his shin.

“I’m sorry,” Lovey said.

“Mercy,” said William. “That kid packs a wallop. And you appear to be getting your ass kicked,” he said, regarding the game. “I’ve arrived here not a moment too soon.” All of Lovey’s friends preferred William. They approved of his jocularity, his slow-moving steady ways. He’d been an E.R. doc; it had given him perspective. There was, in this dawn kitchen, to his practiced eyes, no real trouble. Her first husband had been known to storm out of dinner parties, to take offense and cut off friendships—“Dead To Me!” he would declare—to behave like a child always on the verge of tantrum. With him, Lovey had had to be careful, to tread lightly, to pay her full attention.

“Give me that,” William said, taking the baby from Lovey. “Let’s try some shock therapy, shall we?” He opened the back door and stepped out into the cold air, which silenced the baby instantaneously. When he brought her back inside and she began to start another wail, he did the same thing.

Caleb said, “Maybe you should leave her out there?”

“It’d be tempting if there weren’t snow. And then there’s
that
one,” William said, “sitting in her own filth.” This made Caleb laugh, a bright burst of surprised happiness that rarely came upon him. He would repeat this expression for days, amusing himself with its perfectly droll un-profaneness.

William took over the Monopoly game while Lovey attended to diapers. “What is that pile of cash doing there?” he asked of the Free Parking money. It wasn’t in the rules, but it was tradition. William’s children were teenage boys who played football in high school. That was the sort of father he’d been, one who enjoyed a team and rules. If Caleb were his son, he’d have a bristly haircut and would never be allowed to stay up all night playing Monopoly. And if there were to be a board game, it would be something dignified, like chess. By the time Lovey got back with the freshly clothed girls, Caleb’s lip was trembling, something William wouldn’t necessarily notice, since he was playing along just to be a good sport, placeholder. He hadn’t even finished his first cup of coffee. The Free Parking money was gone, she noted.

Lovey let Celia knock the whole enterprise to the floor, a glorious clattering spill of cards and tokens and fluttering cash. Caleb would recall where everything went. He would know whose turn it was and what was mortgaged and which property had hotels.

“An act of god,” William declared. He stretched his fists over his head and flexed open his mouth in a mighty yawn, finished his coffee, gave Lovey a knowing lift of his brow and Caleb a ruffling of his hair, then disappeared into the shower. By the time he returned, the game was underway again and Lovey was nearly destitute.

“You’re hopeless, honey,” William said, settling at his computer for the news. “Hey look,” he said, swinging the screen around for Lovey to see. For a few seconds Lovey studied the Facebook photograph, Bernadette in a short dress, holding a cigarette and a beer bottle, on either side of her Aaron and another man, the two of them equally in possession of her in this flagrantly drugged and drunken state.
Freak blizzard in Duke City!
the comment read, the time imprint only thirty minutes earlier. She had come to Lovey many an occasion, when a teen, wasted and weeping, afraid of her mercurial father, repentant, apologetic and grateful, claiming again and again that only Lovey understood her. That same girl still before Lovey, her loose sedated face, the same idle boys whose reckless seduction she could not resist. And then suddenly the photograph was gone. As if it had been the product of Lovey’s imagination, something she had dreamed. “She took it down,” William said. “Of course. She knows you’d see it, of course she took it down.”

“What?” asked Caleb, monitoring what was transpiring.

“Let’s check with your mom about school,” Lovey said. “Maybe you can take the day off.”

“I don’t want to miss school.”

“Maybe it’ll be a snow day.”

When Bernadette didn’t answer, Caleb suggested calling his father’s mobile number. Before Lovey could find it, Bernadette rang back.

Lovey understood immediately that she was still drunk. “Lovey,” she said. “I’m sorry, the good news is I found him, he’s fine, but the bad news is we have to talk, it’s time to come to Jesus, again.”

Her first husband had stolen from Lovey her best years, keeping her captive during the time that she would have, in some other circumstance, delivered children. He’d fooled her, she thought, he’d held her hostage and then released her when it was too late.

That was the story she told herself and mostly believed. And Bernadette alone of the three girls subscribed to it as well. The others split their loyalty equally, judging nobody, visiting their father, accepting their new ­same-age-as-they stepmother. Only impulsive Bernadette had severed ties. Only loyal Bernadette had stood by Lovey.

“Let her sober up before they go home,” William advised. “Let them both sober up. How about you guys go watch TV?” he asked the children. “How’s about I set up some
Tom and Jerry
?” Lovey had met William through friends, a match everyone approved of, “age appropriate,” her friends and family agreed, pleased to have Lovey squarely tucked away again, married. Her parents had never been happy about her first marriage, never visited without awkwardness and sad sighs, the tragic absence of true grandchildren, these three half-time stepdaughters who did not particularly respond to them. In the story everyone else believed of Lovey’s first marriage, she was lucky to have gotten out before her older husband became a patient, a third aging parent, before the inevitable illness and decline. Those eventualities were still ahead, she supposed, they hadn’t yet come to pass. He was sixty-four, his new wife in her thirties, her picture was also online, available, an undeniably pretty woman. Young. Fresh.

And William? Lovey loved him well enough, in the way of adulthood, she thought, not in the feverish former manner of witless drowning immersion, that love she’d fallen into heedlessly as if into a body of water, with no idea of what such a thing could cost her, it had nearly killed her when all was said and done. Meaning, she’d felt like dying. She would never be that kind of lover again, never endanger herself that way again. And she understood that William, too, had been disposed of, that his ex-wife had had a similar nuclear potency, and that he loved Lovey with the same conscious intensity of somebody exacting a kind of revenge, or, perhaps, simply forever behaving with the belief that his ex was paying attention, that he had need to prove he’d survive and thrive, the victor.
A
victor, anyway.

“I feel like an idiot,” she told William. “How could I let her do this to me?”

“What has she done, really?” he said. “I mean, she could have gotten you to babysit, if she’d wanted, she could have asked you to stay over at her house with them, and you would have. Or she could have told you they were going on a date night or something, either way you would have hung out with the kids overnight, so it’s really not so different. When you think about it.”

“I guess I thought she trusted me.”

“She left her children with you. She called you when she felt like getting trashed. How much more trust do you want?”

“I still feel like a fool.”

“Don’t be so hard on yourself. Everything’s fine. See you tonight.” And he provided another peck on the cheek, this time of the minty variety. And once again Lovey thought of her first husband, his apple-flavored mouth, his kisses that could paralyze her with brutal desire, still, still, even in absentia. That’s what she would have been waiting for, in her dream, his incendiary kiss.

Caleb came back from the television to put in a request of the three-year-old. “She wants Cheerios. I told her no milk in the living room, then she threw the remote at me.” He touched his forehead. He was too thin, and this morning he had dark circles under his eyes. Lovey should have made him go to bed, put him in the girls’ old room with their dolls and posters and trophies. From the living room came the ruckus of cartoon violence, the three-year-old liked to turn up the volume, maybe she was loud because she was a little deaf, Lovey would have to mention that possibility to Bernadette. When she next saw Bernadette.

Meanwhile, Caleb was checking the game board. “Lovey,” he said, “what happened to all your money?”

“What do you mean?” There was surely an explanation he would believe.

His face was suddenly furious, his rage as rare as his laughter, and this time aimed at her. “Don’t let me win,” he demanded. “Don’t you dare let me win!”

The Village

She had only had her driver’s license two weeks when she totaled the family car. Darcy’s father had to rouse a neighbor in order to borrow a vehicle to come retrieve her from the scene of the accident. Her best friend, Lydia, had been taken away by ambulance.

“I love you, Papa!” Darcy cried, before anything else could be said. Preemptive strike. She was still drunk, so that her voice seemed to be produced by a slightly other person than herself, as if she were both ventriloquist and dummy. Crashing into the stone entryway of the cemetery had added adrenaline to the mix, puppet and puppeteer equally manic. Twenty-five years later she recalled her intense urge to run, run, run through the gravestones, to discharge that amazing crazy energy before it did some additional harm.

“I love you, too,” her father had told her. He didn’t mind her blood on his shirt. A blanket was provided by the cops to protect the neighbor’s car’s interior, and Darcy was driven home, the long way, by her father at four in the morning, down Lake Shore, skirting the far edge of Cabrini-Green and roaming the inner tunnels of the empty Loop, steam rising from the street grates, shaggy figures leaning on their shopping carts moving like benign monsters. Drunk still, Darcy viewed this the way she had illustrations in picture books, her father reading aloud, she safely on his lap.

But that night, twenty-five years ago, he ended up telling her a story about himself. A confession, really, intended to defuse the horror of what she’d just done, of the mistake she’d made, of the terrible consequences she expected. “First,” he said, “nobody is dead.” Drunkenness and trespassing were her public crimes; for them she would be penalized in a completely quantifiable way. That punishment would have an end point. “But your mother is going to be very . . .”

“Mad?” Darcy said, choking up again. “Mad” was a mild description of what her mother would be. She was going to be apoplectic with rage, anxiety, disappointment, frustration—what a
waste
such an accident represented! Not to mention the ancillary trouble—the station wagon was the only family vehicle. People had to go to work, to school, to the store. And who would be left to solve this series of extremely tedious and costly problems? Who would be charged with filing insurance claims, shopping for another secondhand car, enduring the judgment of neighbors and co-workers and extended family? Her mother prided herself on being a superior parent, the kind of parent other parents called in order to ask advice, display their own ignorance and need; Darcy was the second youngest of six children, five of whom were exemplary citizens. Now look who’d gone and tarnished her mother’s stellar reputation.

Vindication—that, too, would come with the rest. Her mother had always insinuated that this was exactly where Darcy was headed. “I wish I
was
dead!” she declared to her father.

“Darcy, you don’t!” he said.

“Yes, I do!”

“No!” He stopped the car, pulling abruptly to a curb. “People make mistakes,” her father pleaded. He amended his platitude: “People do things that other people might call mistakes.” And then he told Darcy about his friend Lois. Darcy leaned against the cool glass of the passenger window, miserable, wrapped in a blanket that smelled of tire rubber, aware of Chicago’s shadowy homeless population—also in blankets—as they sought shelter in an icy Saturday’s most severe hour while her worried father confessed his own shame, that thing that other people might call infidelity.