The Guy Not Taken (28 page)

Joe smiled winningly. “My treat.” He raced toward the house, with Harry trotting behind him.

“Pizza,” Shelly said. “One day he’ll turn into a pepperoni.”

“He seems like a good kid.”

“He is,” she agreed. “Even though he knows he’s not supposed to be calling radio stations. Listen, I really am sorry for being so suspicious. Too many TV movies, I guess.”

“I would have been scared, too,” Doug said. “I’ve got kids. Daughters. Don’t worry about it. Please.”

Her mouth curled into something between a smirk and a smile as she looked at him, eyebrows lifted. “So, this is your job? Driving through the streets of the suburbs, dispensing fruit and goodwill?”

Doug nodded. “Something like that,” he said. It had been a long time since anyone had teased him, and he wanted very much to keep talking to her. He wanted to find out what she and Joe did on the weekends, what they cooked for dinner, and where she drove her silver car every morning. He wanted to see if he could make her smile again. But he knew he had pressed his luck far enough for one afternoon, and he had no idea how to surmount the lie that lay between them.

“I really should be going,” he said.

“Oh, sure,” she said, and made a face. “My first grown-up in days, and I scare him away.”

“Your first . . .” Doug wasn’t sure he’d heard her right.

“I’m a children’s librarian. I don’t get to talk to grown-ups much.” She gazed at the sky, shaking her head in rueful disbelief. “Grown-ups. I still can’t believe I’m one. When Joe was a little guy, like maybe three, he used to come to the top of the stairs at night and yell, ‘I need a grown-up!’ My husband and I would just look at each other . . .” She smiled and shrugged. “Like, if we find one, we’ll get back to you.” She shook her head again. “That was a long time ago. How about you? Tell me about your kids?”

“I have two daughters. They’re fourteen and twelve.”

“Girls,” Shelly said, sounding envious. “What are their names?”

“Sarah and Alicia,” Doug said. “They live with their mother.” He tossed out another fact, something else to show what they had in common. “My girls go to Joe’s elementary school.”

“So you did that fathers’ breakfast thing.” She looked at him with eyes the same shade of hazel as her son’s. “I think it’s crummy that the school keeps having them, with so many kids without fathers. It’s really hard for Joe.”

“It must be hard for you, too,” Doug ventured.

Shelly nodded. “Not my favorite day of the year.”

Doug kept looking at her, drinking her in, her little gold earrings, the silk bow against the nape of her neck, the way her hair caught the waning light. He felt light-headed and dizzy and excited and ashamed.

“So,” she said, and smiled at him, then quickly looked down at the driveway, and the oranges between them. “It’s getting cold out here. Would you like to come in for a cup of coffee?”

“Look,” Doug blurted miserably, “Ms. Stern.”

“Shelly.”

“Shelly,” he repeated, but could go no further.

“Come on,” she said. He wanted so badly to follow her, to wrap his hands around a mug of something warm and bask in her attention.

“I’m not from the radio station,” he said. She took two quick steps back, as if he’d slapped her.

“What?” she whispered. “What?”

The look on her face made him feel as if he were biting ice. “I’m an actuary,” he said.

“Is this a joke?”

Doug shook his head. “Let me explain,” he said, hearing the pleading in his voice. “My telephone number’s just one number away from the radio station’s. I was sleeping when Joe called, and when he asked if he’d won the contest, I just said yes without thinking.”

Finished, he dared to look at her. Her eyes were too bright, and she was holding her purse in front of her body again.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I know how you must feel.”

“Oh, no, you don’t,” she said. “You absolutely do
not
. You have no idea how it feels when you pull into your driveway and see some stranger standing there with your son. No idea at all.” Her lips were trembling. He’d scared her, he saw, and the best thing he could do would be to leave. But he couldn’t.

“I’m sorry,” he said again.

“I try so hard,” she said, “so hard to keep Joe safe. I worry about him; I worry all the time, and you just come waltzing up here, and he doesn’t even know enough to make sure you’re who you say you are! You could be anyone! You could have done anything to him!”

She glared at him a moment longer, then shook her head and turned toward the house.

Doug scooped up the oranges and followed her, thinking
that he couldn’t be anyone, that he could be only himself. He was stuck that way, but it would have to be enough. He reached for her shoulder. “You know my name,” he said.

She turned toward him again and looked him full in the face, her little hands balled into fists.

“You know I’m sorry.”

“Sorry,” she repeated, as if she’d never heard the word.

“It was a dumb thing to do. I should have just told the truth.”

“Why?” she asked. “That’s what I want to know. Why?”

Doug thought. “I don’t know, really. I guess I wanted to do something good.”

“Well,” she said, glaring at him. “Next time you could maybe make a donation to the Cancer Society. Or the library. We really need a new roof.”

“Maybe I will,” he said, matching the heat in her voice. “But this is what I did this time, and I can’t undo it now.”

She looked as if she were about to say something more. Then she closed her mouth abruptly, not meeting his eyes but not running away, either. Doug was thinking of how to reassure her when the door to the house opened.

“Mom!”

Joe was standing in the doorway, with Harry poking his head between the boy’s legs. A wedge of light spilled out into the early-evening darkness. “We have to get the pizza!” the boy called.

“I am sorry,” Doug said one more time. He handed her the bag of fruit and started walking toward his car.

He was halfway there when he heard her behind him. “Wait,” she said.

He turned to face her with his heart in his throat.

“Hold still,” she said and looked him over from head to toe,
examining him the way she might have measured a new piece of furniture, inspecting it for stains and scratches, wondering if it would fit through the door.

“Oranges,” she said. Her voice was soft.

“Oranges from Florida,” he said.

Shelly bit her lip. “I want to believe you.” Her voice trailed off. “You seem sincere, and I want to believe you are. Can you understand?”

Too anxious even to breathe, Doug just nodded.

She studied his face for an endless moment. “Come on, then,” she said. He held the oranges and followed her inside.

T
OUR OF
D
UTY

J
ason and Marion Meyers were at their third college in two days, having lunch at the student union. The air was thick and hot, filled with the tortured screeches of metal-legged chairs being dragged across the tile floor. Students in the smoking section, tucked on one side of the big round room, produced a bluish cloud that edged its way out of the enclosure to hang, like fog, over everything.

Marion and Jason, mother and son, had the same thing for lunch: bagels, cream cheese squeezed out of tinfoil tubes, and overpriced, overly sweet, all-natural black-cherry soda. They nibbled their food and watched each other with identical gray-green eyes.

Marion sipped her soda and grimaced, setting the can aside. “Well, this seems like a nice one,” she said encouragingly. “Beautiful campus. Do you like it?”

Jason shrugged and gave a noncommittal grunt. Ever since they’d left their home in Rhode Island the day before, Jason had communicated primarily by grunts and shrugs and long silences. None of the colleges they’d seen so far—Cornell, Bowdoin, and Amherst, each resplendent in fall foliage and ivied marble—had earned an entire sentence. With a flick of his
tweed-clad shoulders and an unintelligible mumble, Jason had dismissed the swim teams and prelaw societies, the glee clubs and the frats. The quick flashes of humor that usually popped up in his conversation were absent. As he sat paging through the student paper, his broad shoulders were hunched and his face was solemn, even glum.

No surprise, Marion thought. Hal was supposed to have taken Jason on this trip. They’d planned it together over the summer, looking at maps, studying brochures, looking up admissions statistics in the Barron’s guide. But Hal had gotten busy in August. A case in Ohio had taken him out of town for two weeks, and he’d been working late all through September and October, coming home after Jason was asleep, leaving before he awoke. At least, she devoutly hoped that that was what Jason thought was going on. Let him get through the interviews, she told herself. Then she’d tell him the truth.

She took a deep breath and arranged her face cheerfully. “Have I ever told you my theory about bagels?”

Jason rolled his eyes. “I can’t wait to hear that,” he muttered, but he was smiling just a bit.

“The excellence of a college is in direct proportion to the quality of its bagels. Good bagels, good school,” Marion said. Closing her eyes, she picked up her bagel and sniffed it with the studied concentration of a wine connoisseur. “Nineteen ninety,” she intoned. “A very good year.” She took a nibble and chewed intently. “Not bad,” she pronounced, and looked at Jason. His eyes were fixed earnestly on her face. Despite his red cheeks, still sunburned from a summer as a lifeguard, he looked very grown up. Marion pushed her plate toward her son and looked away.

“What do you think Dad had to do that was so important?” It was the most Jason had spoken since they left home at five o’clock in the morning two days ago, driving past the
clapboard Colonials and curtained windows in her husband’s Mercedes.

Marion shrugged. “Oh, you know how he is with those depositions, he probably just got behind . . .” Her voice trailed off. The lie sat on the table between them. Marion could almost see it crouching there, leering at her. “I know he didn’t mean to hurt your feelings,” she said lamely, taking little comfort in the fact that this, at least, was true. She fished in her purse, past the maps that Hal had meticulously marked with lime-green Hi-Liter, and pulled out five dollars. “Go get your old mom some of that frozen yogurt.” Jason studied her for a silent moment. Then in one fluid movement he was up and out of his chair, moving toward the line, attracting plenty of attention along the way. Tall and slender, with curly reddish hair a few shades brighter than her own, he moved with a lanky grace. Two girls with big hoop earrings nudged each other when he passed them, and the girl behind the cash register stared, smoothing her uniform, fidgeting with her hair. These visits mean he’s leaving, she thought. Soon he’ll be gone. Her heart gave a sudden, painful twist. She closed her eyes and rested her head in her hands.

“Mom?”

Jason was standing in front of her, looking worried, with two cups of yogurt in his hands.

She made herself smile. “Just thinking.”

He smiles. “Well, you must be out of practice if it takes so much effort. I got old-world chocolate or strawberry. What do you want?”

“Huh? Oh, strawberry, please,” Marion said. Watching her son walk away, she thought, with a ferocity that startled her,
I will never let anything hurt him. Never.

•   •   •

Their hotel in Middletown had a swimming pool. Marion made sure of that. She and Jason both loved to swim. In the water
and out of it, they understood each other with a special, unspoken ease.

Marion had always been a swimmer. “You’re water-based,” Hal had joked during their honeymoon, when she’d shunned golf and tennis and tanning in favor of spending hours immersed in the turquoise waters of Bermuda. He’d waded up to his knees a couple of times and floated on his back for a few moments before paddling back to shore. The truth was that the water made him nervous. He didn’t like the feeling of being small in the vastness of the ocean, of being pushed and prodded by currents and waves, forces he couldn’t control.

Still, Hal did his best to accommodate her. When his practice got off the ground, after he’d purchased the obligatory mini-mansion in the suburbs and the bright red sports car, he’d presented Marion with a combination in-ground pool and hot tub for her birthday. In the summer, she would often take a late-night swim to cool off before going to sleep. Sometimes Hal would come out back, sit on the edge of a chaise lounge, and watch her stroking through the warm, lit water, the muscles in her back working in clean, pleasing harmony. And later he would join her in the hot tub, where the water was shallow enough for him to feel at ease. His cotton pajamas and her damp swimsuit would lie crumpled together on a lounge chair, and the crickets would be chirping, and the air, humid and oppressive during the day, would lie on their skin like a caress.

Her three oldest children hated the water. Marion had taught all of them to swim, but it was hard work. Amy, Josh, and Lisa had to be coaxed into the shallow end with the promises of ice cream or toys, and they were visibly uncomfortable once they got there, pinching their noses shut and squinting anxiously toward the deep end as if the water was going to rise up and carry them away. Marion made sure that each could manage at least a respectable breaststroke before relinquishing them
to drier sports, games that involved sticks or balls, molded rubber mouth guards and arcane offsides rules.

And then there was Jason, her baby, her surprise. Jason had taken to the water just like his mother. As a newborn, he was happiest at bath time, cooing and gurgling as Marion poured water over his plump body. He learned to swim at two and a half when, without water wings and without fear, he flung himself into the deep end of the pool and bobbed up and down like a cork, giggling cheerfully as his grandmother screamed and Hal, still clad in his wing tips and suit, jumped in after him.

That summer, on nights when Hal worked late, Marion would sometimes take Jason to the pool with her. She’d hook him over her hip and bounce him up and down in the shallow water, both of them laughing. She would fling him high in the air, and he’d land with a splash, paddling back to her, eyes wide open and arms outstretched, begging for more.