Home Song (14 page)

The blue Lexus pulled up on his right and he felt suddenly guilty of much more than a premarital peccadillo eighteen years ago. Two cars, side by side, a woman getting out of one and getting into the other—it had the appearance of a clandestine tête-à-tête. He jumped out of his car as she got out of hers—an effort to allay his sense of wrongdoing—and waited to see what she'd do.

She moved toward the tail end of the cars and he did the same.

Neither of them said hello. They stood near their rear bumpers searching for comfortable places to fix their eyes, casting about for grace in the midst of this unsettling debacle.

“Thank you for coming,” he thought to say.

“I didn't know what else to do. Kent was right there in the room with me when the phone rang.”

“I didn't know what else to do either except call you.”

She was wearing sunglasses and a purse over her shoulder with her thumb caught beneath the strap. Her dress was another one of those sacky shapeless things that made him happy he'd married a woman with a perkier style. He braved a glance at Monica but her body language and the slant of her sunglasses suggested she'd be damned if she'd glance back.

The autumn sun drummed down on the blacktop and reflected off the paint of their cars, into their eyes.

“Should we sit in my car and talk?”

Her sunglasses flashed his way. Her lips remained a thin, colorless ribbon. Without replying, she walked toward the passenger door of the Taurus and got in.

When he'd slid behind the wheel they sat in weighty
silence. Each was embarrassed to be there. Had they any sort of sentimentality about their past, it might have eased them, but they had only regret and very little recollection of the brief intimacy that had caused this meeting today.

Finally he cleared his throat and said, “Look, I was running on adrenaline when I called you. I didn't really think through how or where we'd meet. I just picked up the phone and dialed. If you want to go someplace where we can have a soft drink and—”

“This is fine. You said Kent walked your daughter home from the game last night.”

“Yes. I just found out about an hour ago.”

“So I assume you want to tell your family who he really is.”

“I've got to. I've known the truth for only ten days and it's been a living hell for me ever since. I'm no good at keeping secrets from my wife, no good at all.”

She lowered her forehead to the butt of one hand. Her arms were crossed on the purse in her lap, its leather strap gone slack and floating free of her shoulder.

Tom said, “The only reason I didn't tell them this noon was because I thought you and I should discuss it first. You should tell Kent sometime over the weekend, too, so that they all find out at the same time. I don't want one of my kids to be the one to tell him at school.”

“No, that wouldn't be good.”

Time passed, great chunks of silence, while they envisioned telling their families.

“I got pretty panicky when I heard he'd walked her home.”

“Yes,” she said, rather detachedly, Tom thought. She seemed a very unemotional woman, tightly reined, giving
away little in her facial expressions or the inflection of her voice.

“Has he mentioned Chelsea at all?”

“Once.”

“What did he say?”

“Not much.”

“Nothing about her personally?”

“No.”

He thought about how secretive teenagers could be. “It's uncanny how they took to each other. I've been watching them all week long meeting by their lockers before school, sitting next to each other in the lunchroom. I just kept hoping it was because she was showing him his way around school, but . . . well . . . no such luck.”

Someone came out of the restaurant, got into a car sitting a couple of parking slots to their left, and drove away, leaving space all around their two cars.

“Listen,” Monica said, shifting in her seat as if uncomfortable not with it but with herself, “I didn't tell you the truth just now. Kent did say something more about Chelsea.”

“What?”

She shot him a glance, as brief as a blink before facing front. “That he envied her for having a father.”

Tom took the news like a kidney punch. For a minute it was hard to breathe normally.

Monica went on. “We fought about it, and that's rare for us. It made me realize how important it is for him to know about you. It's . . . it's time I told him.”

“So you'll do that? Before school on Monday?”

“What else can I do?”

“You know,” Tom said, “my son Robby hasn't been exactly congenial to Kent on the football field. If you want to
know the truth, I think he's jealous. I don't know what this will do to them.”

“Be honest, Tom. We don't know what it'll do to any of us with the possible exception of me. My life will probably go on just as it was. It's all the rest of you who'll have to work through a tangle of emotions over this.”

Tom thought about it and sighed. He slumped lower in his seat and let his head fall back against the headrest.

“It's peculiar. I had this talk with Robby today about how every person you meet changes you, how every moral dilemma you face shapes your character. Maybe I was saying it for my own benefit and didn't realize it till now.”

A car pulled in on their left. Its windows were down and the radio on. Tom glanced over just as the driver reached down to shut off the radio. The woman saw him, smiled, and waggled her fingers.

“Hi, Tom,” she called through their two open windows.

He straightened in his seat. Heat shot up his body. “Hi, Ruth.”

She got out of her car and headed his way.

“Oh, shit,” he mumbled.

“Who's that?”

“My next-door neighbor.”

Ruth reached his open window and leaned down. “Hi, Cl . . . oh . . . sorry, I thought it was Claire with you.”

“Monica Arens, this is my neighbor Ruth Bishop.”

Ruth gave a quick smile, her eyes bright with interest. “Just came over to pick up some of their bread sticks for supper. They're Dean's favorites, and for once he's going to be home for a meal.” She strained forward and studied Monica with unveiled curiosity even while speaking to Tom. “Is Claire at home?”

“Yes. She's housecleaning today.”

“Oh.” Ruth seemed to be waiting for more, an explanation perhaps, but with none forthcoming she let her hand slip off the window ledge and chattered, “Well, I'd better get going, get my bread sticks. Nice to see you, Tom. Say hi to Claire.”

“I will.”

Watching her retreat toward the restaurant Tom said, “Well, that clinches it. If I don't get home and tell Claire first, Ruth will do it for me.”

“And I've got to go home and tell Kent, too.” Monica put her purse strap up over her shoulder but stayed where she was. “I never know what to say to you at moments like this. I just always feel so awkward.”

“Me too.”

“Good luck telling your family, I guess.”

“Good luck to you, too.”

Still they remained where they were.

“Should we talk again?” she asked.

“Let's wait and see.”

“Yes . . . yes, I suppose you're right.”

“I think it'll be unavoidable.”

After considering awhile Monica asked, “This is the right thing to do, isn't it, Tom?”

“Absolutely.”

“Yes . . . absolutely,” she repeated, as if trying to convince herself. “Then why am I so hesitant to go home and do it?”

“Fear,” he said.

“Yes, I suppose.”

“It's not much fun, is it?”

“No. It's awful.”

“I've been living with it ever since you walked into my office, and to tell the truth, it'll be a relief to get it out in the
open and face it, whatever needs facing. My mind's been . . . oh, scattered, I suppose you'd say.”

“Yes . . . well . . .”

“Here she comes again.” Ruth Bishop came toward them carrying a white paper bag. Tom watched her all the way.

“Do you have a strong marriage, Tom?” Monica asked, her eyes, too, following the woman.

“Yes, very.”

Ruth Bishop went to her car, hefted the bag up so it could be seen above the roof, and called, “I got a whole dozen of 'em! Dean better make sure he comes home now!”

Tom sent her a perfunctory smile and an empty wave of acknowledgment.

Monica said, “Good, because you're going to need it.” When Ruth had driven away, she added, “Now I guess I'd really better go. I'm anxious to have this day over with.”

“Good luck,” he said again. “And thanks for coming.”

“Sure.”

There was a certain sadness to their parting, the sadness of two people whose past has caught up with them and who—in spite of feeling no physical attraction toward one another—feel drawn together by their similar fates. She would go to her family and he to his. They would both face a baring of conscience that would forever alter their lives. Leaving the parking lot, driving in opposite directions, they felt once more a melancholy regret, for they had not even one warm memory of each other to carry as consolation for the upheaval their lives were about to undergo.

 

Kent was on the portable phone when his mother returned home. She came through the living room, where he was sprawled on the wide-armed sofa with one heel on the coffee
table, his foot waggling back and forth like a windshield washer. His chin rested on his chest and he was grinning.

Passing through the room, Monica said, “Get your foot off the furniture.”

He crossed it over his knee, imperturbable, and continued with his conversation. “No, I told you, hardly ever. So are you going to teach me, or what? . . . No, where? . . . No, we never had school dances. A couple of times they had these big parties out at Beaudry's house with live bands and everything, and Rich asked me over, but we just sort of watched the old people dance because we were the youngest ones there. . . . Homecoming? . . . Who says you have to dance just because it's Homecoming? . . .”

His mother came out of the kitchen, drying her hands on a linen towel. “Kent, I have to talk to you. Could you cut your call short, please?”

He covered the mouthpiece and said, “I'm talking to a girl, Mom.”

“Cut it short, please,” she repeated, and disappeared.

He removed his hand from the mouthpiece and said, “Sorry, Chelsea, I have to go. Mom needs me for something. Listen, you gonna be home later? . . . Maybe I'll call you then. . . . Yeah, sure. You too . . . Bye.”

He rocked up out of the sofa and sprang to his feet, taking the phone along. “Hey, Mom,” he said, rounding the corner into the kitchen, tossing the phone from hand to hand. “What's so important I can't finish my conversation first?”

She was unnecessarily rearranging fruit in a white glass latticework bowl, shifting peaches, bananas, and apples.

“Who was the girl?” she asked.

“Chelsea Gardner.”

She leveled her eyes on him, one hand resting on the bowl
while holding a green apple, all of her gone so still and sober he wondered if she'd lost her job or something.

He stopped playing hot potato with the phone and said, “Mom, what's wrong?”

Unconsciously, she took the apple along and said, “Let's go in the living room, Kent.”

He sat on the sofa where he'd been. She sat at a right angle, in a deep tapestry chair, leaning forward with both elbows on her tight-pressed knees, working the apple on an axis in her fingertips. “Kent,” she said, “I'm going to tell you about your father.”

He got very still, everything inside him seizing up like during those last few seconds before he dove off the high board the first time.

“My father?” he repeated, as if the subject were new.

“Yes,” she said. “You're right. It's time.”

He swallowed and fixed his gaze on her, gripping the telephone as if it were the handlebar on a roller coaster. “All right.”

“Kent, your father is Tom Gardner.”

His lips fell open. He couldn't seem to close them. “Tom Gardner? You mean . . . Mr. Gardner, my principal?”

“Yes,” she said quietly, and waited. She had stopped rotating the apple. It hung suspended in her fingertips above the carpet.

“Mr. Gardner?” he whispered croakily.

“Yes.”

“But he's . . . he's Chelsea's father.”

“Yes,” she said quietly, “he is.”

Kent fell back against the sofa, his eyes closed, the phone still gripped in his right hand, his thumb crooked sharply against it with the nail bent over.

Mr. Gardner, one of the nicest men he'd ever met, who'd
been smiling and saying hi every day this week in the halls and who sometimes put a hand on his shoulder, a man he'd liked from the minute he met him, partly because of how he treated his kids, partly because of how he treated other kids. A man he would see on Monday and every school day for the rest of the year. The man who would hand him his high school diploma.

Chelsea's father.

And good God, he'd kissed Chelsea last night.

Reactions came tumbling too fast to sort. Shock turned him quivery. He opened his eyes and saw the corner of the ceiling looking blurry through his tears.

“I walked Chelsea home from the game last night.”

“Yes, I know. I just left Tom fifteen minutes ago. He told me.”

Kent sat up. “You met Mr. Gardner? Are you . . . I mean, is he—”

“No, he's nothing to me beyond the fact that he's your father. We only met to talk about this, about us telling our families how you two are related. That's all.”

“So he does know about me. You said he didn't.”

“I know, and I'm sorry, Kent. I don't make a habit of lying to you, but you can see why I didn't think you should know. Not until this thing with Chelsea came up.”