Random Acts of Kindness (8 page)

A day or two at the most, and she’d be back on her college stomping grounds.

“Hey,” Claire said, tossing her Stetson at her feet, “do you guys ever wonder what happened to Theresa?”

Uh-oh
. Nicole plunged the key into the ignition. “I assume you’re talking about Three-Tat Tess, yes?”

Claire said, “She’s probably Ten-Tat Tess by now.”

“All I remember is that she tooled around at community college for a while.” Nicole stretched her arm across the back of Claire’s seat then was speared by the beady black stare of a three-foot purple bear. “Hey, Jenna, are you sure you want to ride beside that thing? There’s still room in the trunk.”

“I like it here.” Jenna pressed up against it. Lucky, cowering on Jenna’s other side, gave a little whine. “It’s like a mascot, sharing the road with us.”

“Okay then.” Nicole eased out of the parking spot. “Anyway, after college as far as I know, Theresa pretty much fell off the face of the earth.”

“I had Theresa’s old e-mail.” Claire reached across the dashboard to flick on the air-conditioning. “But it bounced when my sisters tried to add it to the blog.”

Nicole ventured, “So what got you thinking about our rebel classmate?”

“Maya mentioned her the other night over the campfire, remember?”

Nicole straightened the car and headed for the fairground exit. “Let me guess. She lives just a few miles from here.”

“I wasn’t going to say that at all.” Claire gave her an eye while replaiting the tail of her braid. “I was just going to mention that Maya told me she got a Christmas card from Theresa just last year. She’s living on a farm.”

“Theresa is feeding chickens?” Jenna rustled in the backseat, kicking off her sneakers. “Our Tess, with the purple hair and the nose ring?”

“People change.” Claire clutched the Jesus strap as Nicole poked the nose of the car onto the country road. “And you’d have acted out, too, Jenna, if you lived like she did in one of those houses by the old cannery.”

“Saint Claire.” Nicole shook her head. “What a soft touch you are. You called her, I suppose.”

“You’d have killed me if I hadn’t.”

The car rumbled onto the gravel-scattered road. “One long detour just wasn’t enough for you, was it?”

“Unfortunately, nobody answered the phone at Theresa’s house. Maya did give me her address, though.”

“Good. Then you can write to her. Maybe on the way back—”

“Nicole, you’re a jet streaking across the sky, and I’m a bee seeking flowers.”

“I’ll get there faster.”

“But twenty bucks says I’ll have a much better time. Aren’t you curious as to where she lives?”

Nicole accelerated as they approached the on-ramp for Interstate 90. “I suspect it isn’t Chicago, which is where
I
want to go. And I know it’s a long way from here, or you wouldn’t be tiptoeing around the subject.”

“You’re so busy running here and there that you’ve forgotten that the goal of life is learning.”

“Wow, for a moment there you actually sound like a Buddhist.”

“And Buddhists teach that we only progress in life when we open up our attention to the universe. I didn’t go looking for Theresa—Maya mentioned her. Now, all day, she’s been prancing in my head.”

“There’s an image.”

“It’s Karmic. We have to take action.”

Nicole glanced in the rearview mirror. “Jenna, you’re awfully quiet. Do you want to visit Theresa?”

“Theresa scared the hell out of me.”

Nicole gave Claire a nudge. “You’re outvoted.”

“But then again,” Jenna added, “any side trip that takes me farther from my cheating husband is a positive thing.”

Claire raised a slow eyebrow. “Well, Nic, aren’t you the least bit curious as to what happened to that wild girl we all once knew?”

Nicole was curious, yes, but not about Theresa. Nicole hardly knew the girl except by reputation. Claire had hung out with Theresa in middle school before the girl started breaking into hardware stores and setting garbage bins on fire. Three-Tat Tess had been suspended from school too many times for Nicole to remember. But Claire tended to keep her hooks in people, especially the broken ones.

Nicole’s curiosity ran on a completely different track. “You know,” she said, “when most people take a cross-c
ountry
trip, they tend to map out their journey depending on the landmarks or the tourist attractions.”

“I’ve always had a deep suspicion of ‘most people.’” Claire slipped her bare feet up against the glove compartment. “They tend to be a downright boring bunch.”

“Just imagine everything we’ve passed by,” Nicole said. “We could have made a detour to Yellowstone, or the Grand Teton National Park. We didn’t see Devils Tower or the Crazy Horse Memorial. We hardly explored the Badlands, and back by Maya’s dig, we couldn’t have been more than a few dozen miles from Mount Rushmore—”

“Tourist trap.”

“Instead, Claire, you’ve got us on some kind of Pine Lakes cross-country magical mystery tour.”

“I haven’t the faintest idea what you’re talking about.”

Nicole raised a hand to count them off. “Jin, Sydney, Maya, Theresa. Even me.”

“Intelligent company.”

“And free beds.”

Claire gave her an all-knowing look. “Whatever you’re looking for in Pine Lake, Nic, it’ll still be there if we arrive just a few days later.”

Nicole flexed her fingers over the steering wheel. Claire spoke the truth, a truth that was just beginning to bite. Nicole didn’t want to be the rigid coach following some prewritten playbook. She certainly had never been like that in Pine Lake.

Moreover, she was weary of spending this whole journey like a fugitive hearing the distant baying of hounds.

She pressed the accelerator. The car surged forward. She felt an old, familiar, slipping sensation, as if the ground beneath the Chevy was slick with rain even though the South Dakota sky was crystal-blue and every car in the distance tossed up a haze of dust. She’d always been wary of abrupt changes in plans. A whole future could transform because of a single unfettered impulse. Like a moment of passion in a graduate-school dorm after a high-stakes billiards game with a sexy young man.

“So,” Nicole said, strangely breathless, “where, exactly, does Theresa live?”

Kansas

S
ince Jenna had tossed her things in the back of her sedan and left Seattle behind her, she’d felt like a top—spinning, spinning, spinning—and as long as the world was a blur outside and events kept hurtling at her, then she could maintain her momentum with no fear of that first fateful wobble.

Now nearly three hundred miles south of Sioux Falls, just crossing the border into Kansas, Jenna stared out the bug-splattered window as she drove past the soaring poles of a wind farm. In the backseat, Claire napped with her mouth open, sinking into the purple stuffed bear, with Lucky curled up in the hollow of her lap. In the passenger’s seat, Nicole bent over her phone, humming in her absent, repetitive way to some country song she’d heard about a hundred miles ago, during the long stretch where the radio could detect nothing but Dwight Yoakam and hair bands. The wind farm’s unholy whirr was audible above the high-pitched wheeze of the engine, and that was when Jenna’s whole body started to shake.

It was a mistake to remember the last time Nate slipped his hand across her hip and burrowed his fingers beneath the waistband of her pajama bottoms—as she just had, moments ago, when she’d startled out of the memory only to notice that she’d drifted halfway to the other side of the road. Too long a stretch of driving was dangerous. Remembering the better times of two weeks ago was dangerous, too.

She watched the odometer tick over another mile, keenly conscious of Nicole in the passenger seat sweeping her fingertip across her phone. Jenna just knew Nicole would have seen the divorce coming long before the papers were drafted. Nicole would have picked up on all the subtle signals of a husband growing distant and not be left wondering afterward how he could have made love to her right up to the night before he’d handed her the petition.

“Nicole,” she found herself saying, “what do you know about divorce?”

Nicole’s humming stopped on a hitch. Her fingers stilled, poised over the face of her phone.

Jenna had never really understood why people reacted this way whenever she asked a simple question.

“I don’t know much,” Nicole stuttered. “I mean, Lars and I have had some hair-pulling screamers, but we never go to bed angry, and the makeup sex, well…”

Jenna made a sound that was meant to be a laugh, but she suspected that it came out more like a hiccup.

“I did have a client who went through a nasty split.” Nicole slipped her cell phone in the purse by her feet. “I know, in the beginning, the timing is important. I hope you don’t think I was out of line…but after what you told me in Cheyenne, I checked out Oregon’s divorce laws. I was worried about that deadline you mentioned, the thirty days you have to file a response.”

Jenna nodded. She wasn’t in the least surprised Nicole had looked into the situation. She’d been quietly observing Nicole for so long that she’d memorized the pattern of sun freckles across the top of Nicole’s shoulders. Nicole was the kind of woman who threw herself deep into things. Jenna had noted how many hours Nicole spent looking things up on her phone. Jenna had even seen Nicole sneak a look at Claire’s phone when it buzzed only moments ago.

“I have to say,” Nicole continued, “I’m having a hard time wrapping my mind around the fact that he scheduled a joint appointment with a lawyer only a week after he served you papers. That hardly gives you any time—”

“Nate must have spent hours with an attorney already,” Jenna said, “working out child support payments and how to equitably divide my 401(k)s.”

Nicole allowed a beat of silence. “It’s odd that he’s rushing.”

The center yellow line wavered in her vision as she remembered the moment. She’d hardly taken her raincoat off after coming home from the airport. Nate stood in the kitchen and asked for a minute of her time. She’d thought he was going to hand her a contract to review for his next commission—instead she found herself named as a respondent in the Circuit Court of the State of Oregon.

“Zoe doesn’t know yet.” Jenna winced as a truck zoomed by on the left. “He waited until Zoe was on a plane to camp before he served me.”

“He doesn’t expect this to be over and done before you guys tell her, right?”

“I think he does.” If the air bag explosively inflated and punched her in the solar plexus, Jenna didn’t think her chest could feel sorer. “Zoe once had a stuffed toucan. She’d loved the fuzz right off the fabric to the point that it leaked stuffing. So one week, when we went off to Disneyland, he hung back at the house to hide it in the basement. He pretended ignorance when we returned and she couldn’t find it. She searched for it among her stuffed animals for a little while. Then, soon enough, she found a pink bear to love. Pinky Bear, she called it. She forgot she’d ever had a toucan.”

“You’re not a stuffed toucan, Jen. Zoe isn’t going to forget her mother.”

“It might be better for everyone if I just went away—”

“Don’t say that.”

Nicole’s fingers dug into her shoulder.

“Listen.” Nicole gave her a little shake. “On the fairgrounds in Sioux Falls, I watched you spend forty bucks trying to win that silly purple bear for your daughter. You’ve bought a postcard at every single gas station and truck stop from Reno to Omaha. I’ve watched you agonizing in the backseat as you tried to write. I’ve seen you drop those postcards in the mailbox only to run back and try to dig them out again.”

Jenna blinked and kept her eyes forward, intensely aware of Nicole’s ocular implant burning a hole in her profile.

“You love your daughter,” Nicole said huskily, “and whatever is going on between the two of you, this much is true: it’s never better for
anyone
if someone you love just ‘goes away.’”

Nicole released her. Nicole turned her face away so Jenna could only see the familiar whorl of her hair as she pressed her knuckles against her lips.

In work, Jenna trusted Chinese translators to repeat her words to her foreign clients in a way that was culturally sensitive and idiomatically correct. Into that language gap fell a hundred thousand verbal gaffes. She only wished there existed emotional translators she could hire to follow her around and prevent her from saying the kind of things that evoked such strong reactions in her friends.

And in her daughter.

When Nicole spoke again, her voice was low and controlled. “Nobody likes conflict. But this is one of those times in your life when you’re going to need to dig deep and find the courage to face Nate and speak your mind.”

“I can manage conflict. There’s conflict at the hedge fund all the time.” She’d long learned to slip on her work persona like a suit of armor, and then shuck it off when she got home. “My boss only got things done when we worked under pressure—”

“That’s professional, and that’s admirable, and it explains your career success. But, Jenna, be honest. Personal conflict is something you avoid.”

Two thousand miles
, Jenna thought.
Maybe she
is
finally getting to know me.

Nicole reached over to fiddle with the knob for the fan. “Tell me, did Nate’s papers have any kind of temporary status quo order of custody, or ex parte order or anything like that?”

Jenna didn’t like to think about the papers, but those terms were unfamiliar. “I don’t remember anything except where he checked the form saying he wanted full legal custody of Zoe.”

“It’s important that you know. I’m worried that since he filed first, he might have the first say in any custody battle.”

Custody battle.

“Is there any way you can document the extent of your role in the parenting of Zoe?”

“Document?”

“I know that sounds cold-blooded. But because you’re the primary breadwinner and Nate’s the primary caretaker,
you’ve
got the burden of proof. If you want full legal custody, or even shared custody, you may have to show evidence of how much you’re involved in Zoe’s life.”

Jenna hesitated. “How much I’m involved now? Or before?”

“Both.” Nicole drew her brows together. “Always. You need to think up the names of witnesses who’ve seen you yelling on the sidelines at Zoe’s sports events. Teachers who’ve sat down with you at the parent-child conferences. Collect ticket stubs from weekends you’ve taken Zoe off to the zoo or to a movie while Nate finishes whatever he does. Did you work any fund-raisers at her elementary school? Did you run for office in the PTA? Did you take her to the last pediatric visit? Orthodontist? Dentist?”

Jenna felt the small muscles between her vertebrae tightening, the slow, cramping urge to bow her shoulders and arc inward, draw her knees to her chest and bury her head in the blue weave of her jeans, except she couldn’t do it, because she was driving, because the road was racing past beneath her feet at—she checked the speedometer—eighty-five miles an hour.

Images flooded her mind. Zoe as an infant swaddled in cotton blankets, a warm bundle she’d lift out of the crib at two a.m. in the light of a single princess lamp. The slow ease into the rocking chair as she unbuttoned her pajama top. With a pinch, she remembered her daughter latching on, the weighty drop of her milk, the lullaby she hummed until Zoe stopped sucking and gifted her with a smile.

For three months, Zoe had been completely hers.

But the mortgage had to be paid. Nate’s commissions were sporadic and unpredictable and didn’t provide medical insurance for the specialists they needed to monitor Zoe’s heart murmur because of a septal defect, a tiny hole between chambers that the doctor promised would close up as she grew. Nate took up the child care responsibilities with an efficiency that she’d admired, that calmed her worried mother’s heart, so that when she kissed them both good-bye and returned to work, she didn’t fear for Zoe’s safety. She just left the house with a vague sense of hollowness that she’d attributed to her milk drying up.

When had it happened? She became the payer of the bills while Nate became the master of the neighborhood playdates. She washed the dishes while Nate placed his lips on Zoe’s brow and gauged instantly whether the fever merited medicine or a swift trip to the pediatrician. When Zoe scraped a knee or tumbled off a swing, she would lift her arms to her father, though her mother stood right beside him on the playground.

Once again, the little brown bird ignored.

“Jenna?”

She’d told herself that when Zoe got older and less dependent on Nate, then Zoe would look to her more. When Zoe became a tween, they would talk about periods and bras and boys and how hard it was to make friends. As a teenager, Zoe would beg her mother to take her shopping, steal her high-heeled shoes from the closet, and vote for romantic comedies for Friday movie nights at home, both of them dipping their hands into the same bowl of popcorn.

Surely she could not be the only woman in the world who’d expected that the child who slipped from her own womb would mirror her not just in the color of her eyes but also in other ways, both good and bad. She’d ushered Zoe to her first day in preschool, cringing and terrified for her baby girl, only to arrive at pickup to watch Zoe tripping out of the schoolroom laughing, having conquered it with aplomb. It was a touch of the changeling. The little shock of those moments multiplied over the years, until one day that same child turned around with unexpected grace to look at the woman who birthed her with the eyes of a stranger.

“Jenna.” Nicole shook her shoulder. “Mind the road.”

She was straddling the lane as a car honked and tried to pass. She eased the car back between the white lines.

“Keep your eyes on the road and listen,” Nicole said as she braced her hand against the dashboard. “I don’t believe for
one minute
that you’ve been a complete outsider in the raising of your daughter.”

“Not always.”

There had been a golden period when Zoe first went to grammar school. Jenna’s heart breaking as Zoe struggled with the heartless mean-girl machinations of fifth grade, running through best friends with alarming swiftness, Zoe’s little Teflon heart rebounding while Jenna suffered every little prickle, every little scorn, holding grudges Zoe airily waved away. Until Zoe—sensing her pain, perhaps—stopped confiding in Jenna and started confiding in Nate instead. He made jokes of everything, teased and ribbed Zoe into laughter while, all at the same time, giving sage advice about friends over his special grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of tomato soup.

“Zoe wrote an essay once, after Bring Your Daughter to Work Day.” Jenna’s throat felt dry, but Nicole’s silence was like a vacuum begging to be filled. “She liked my office, the computer, and all the monitors. She was proud of me. We weren’t always so estranged.”

Overnight, it seemed, a sullen creature emerged from the cocoon of that happy tween. All the force of Zoe’s hormonal swings focused on her
stupid
mother, her
clueless
parent, the adult she couldn’t get away from fast enough.

“There’s no way around it,” Jenna whispered. “For a long time now, Zoe has belonged to Nate.”

Jenna focused on keeping the car between the two white lines, her hands at ten and two o’clock on the steering wheel. She let go momentarily to pat the console beside her, searching for a water bottle, feeling the bite of a straw in her palm as she hit Nicole’s diet soda, knocking fast-food napkins onto the floor. She heard a crack and then felt the smooth sides of a bottle as Nicole shoved it in her hand.

Nicole spoke with slow hesitation that made Jenna wary. “You do understand that full legal custody doesn’t mean you won’t ever see Zoe.”

“The way Nate set it up, I have visitation rights every Wednesday.” She fumbled her grip on the bottle. “Every Wednesday, and every other Saturday.”

Jenna had suspected the schedule was sparse but had nothing to compare it to, until, out of the corner of her eye, she saw Nicole cover her face with her open hand.

“Okay.” Nicole straightened up from under her hand. “There is something else you may want to consider. Oregon is a no-fault divorce state, but fault can be taken into account in the case of custody disputes.”