The Lost Husband (11 page)

I was so torn. We’d worked so hard and been so patient to get her leg working as well as it did—though, happily, Abby only remembered the operations and physical therapy in a vague, theoretical way. Not to mention the accident that had made it all necessary. We were 90 percent there. Abby was so close to being just like the other kids. We were so close to putting it all behind us. “Ninety percent there” should have been more than enough for both of us.

But life is hard enough even when you’re 100 percent there.

I’ve seen movies where parents level with their children about their fears. I’ve seen actors say to their actor children, “Daddy’s trapped in a coal mine, and I don’t know if he’s ever coming back.” Lines like that are so false they make me walk out of the theater. Parents do not lay it all out like that. In fact, they do the opposite. They see their kids slash their hands open with a pocket knife and say, “Looks like you’ve got a little cut there.” Parents thrash with worry in their beds for endless hours and then, in the morning, deny it all.

“I keep worrying how Abby’s doing at school,” I told Jean one morning before the kids were up.

“What kind of worrying?” Jean asked.

“The kind that wakes you up in the dead of night.”

Jean was frothing goat’s milk for cappuccinos. “Why don’t you ask her how she is?”

“I don’t want her to know I’m worried.”

Jean nodded. She got that. Because then Abby might worry, too. In exactly the way you worry when someone tells you not to.

“Can you ask her in a nonworried way?” Jean asked.

I thought about the vast number of times Abby had sniffed out the things I was trying like hell to hide. “I’m not sure that I can,” I admitted.

Jean paused at the counter to size me up. “I can,” she offered at last.

I felt a gust of relief. “Could you? You wouldn’t mind?”

“Easy,” Jean said.

“Of course,” I added, “you’ll likely get nothing but one-word answers.”

“Well,” Jean said, “that’s all anyone ever gives us, really. Just tiny clues.” She patted me on the shoulder. “But we figure out how to read them.”

“I’m terrible at reading them,” I said.

Jean squeezed my shoulder. “You’re better than you think.”

That night at dinner, I asked, “How was school today, babe?”

Abby said, in Spanish and without looking up,
“Excelente.”

In response, Jean took the conversational reins and said, “What do you think of your teacher, Abby?”

Abby had a mouth full of salad. She thought about it while she chewed. Then she said, “She’s very fashionable. I like her scarves and her nail polish. And she tries hard. Even though the boys disobey.”

I should have realized that Jean knew what she was doing—that the best way to get hidden answers is to ask hidden questions. Still, all I could think about was the fact that Jean had asked the wrong question. Why had she asked about the teacher? Who cared about the teacher? I wanted to know about Abby.

And so, on impulse, I decided to jump in—and succeeded brilliantly in shutting her right back down.

“And how was
your
day today, babe?” I asked, as if to say,
Who cares about that boring old teacher?

Abby shrugged. “Fine.”

“What did you do?”

We’d lost eye contact. “School stuff.”

I regrouped. “What was the best thing you did all day?”

“Practiced karate with O’Connor.”

I’d seen them out by the fence, working on slow-motion kicks and chops. But that didn’t count. “I’m talking about school,” I said. “Who’d you play with at recess?”

A shrug. “I don’t know.”

“You don’t know their names? Or you don’t remember?”

“Don’t remember,” she said. And then, “May I be excused?”

Note to self:
Shut the hell up
.

Later, without criticizing, Jean laid it out for me. “The question you’re dying to know the answer to? That’s the one question you can’t ask.”

“That seems needlessly complicated,” I said.

“Sure,” Jean said. “People
are
needlessly complicated. That’s part of what makes us all so fun.”

“I’m sorry,” I said, a little embarrassed at how I hadn’t trusted her to know what to do.

She waved the apology away. “Nonsense,” she said.

In truth, Abby didn’t seem entirely unhappy. She and her brother were now pros at goat grooming, laundry hanging, and general farmyard scampering, and they played every afternoon in the most idyllic way I could have wished for them.

But I kept worrying that something was wrong. After a while, I’d turned it over in my mind so many times that I no longer had any idea if I was on to something, as I’d originally thought—something only I, with my hypersensitive mom antenna, could pick up—or if I’d invented it all myself.

“Watch for clues,” Jean suggested, “but don’t watch so closely that every tiny thing starts to look like a clue.”

Too late.

At bedtime that night, as we rubbed vitamin E on Abby’s scar, I told her my favorite story of her life: a Disneyfied version with the brightest of endings about a young heroine who was fantastically lucky—not
despite
her hardships but
because
of them. I tried my best to dramatize the moral as I always did:
Good things always come out of bad
. With each retelling, the happy ending got happier. And why the hell not? The happy ending was the whole point.

It was getting harder and harder to sell that happy ending, though. Just as it gets harder and harder to sell the idea of the tooth fairy: Your kids start to suspect you’re lying, and they start
trying to catch you in the lie. It becomes more exciting to chase the truth than to hold on to the tooth fairy. That’s growing up, I guess. But kids don’t know that once you give up the tooth fairy, you never get her back. And the same is true of happy endings. I could feel Abby starting to resist hers, and I could feel myself doubling down to keep her convinced. Because if anybody in the entire world deserved a happy ending, it was the fairy-tale version of my sweet girl.

That night, when I hit the last line—“And she lived happily ever after”—Abby resisted again.

“Happily ever after,” she said, “but with a big pink scar down her leg.”

“Yes,” I said, sitting up a little straighter.

“A scar forever, and a little bit of trouble walking.”

“Yes,” I said. “Just a tiny bit.”

“Enough that people could notice, if they wanted to.”

I felt my stomach drop. “Are people noticing, babe?”

Abby pulled the cover up over her legs and nestled her head into the pillow. She looked up to meet my eyes, continuing on as if she hadn’t heard my question. “But she has to remember to be grateful. Right? Because things could always be worse.”

Oh, she was killing me. I turned my head as I felt tears in my eyes and, hoping like hell Abby didn’t see them, I announced, nice and loud, “Bedtime, folks!”

Then Tank, who’d been hopping around the room like a frog, piped up, “You know what’s great about your scar?”

“What?” Abby asked.

“It kind of looks like a crocodile.”

We all took a look. It did kind of look like a crocodile. And God bless Tank for noticing.

“That’s awesome,” Abby said.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” Tank went on, “if it could crawl off your leg and be your pet?”

Abby plainly thought it would. “And bite anybody I wanted it to,” she added.

“Oh,” I said, adding a vague moral influence as I gestured them into bed, “let’s not sic our pet crocodiles on people.”

“You could name him Scar,” Tank went on as they settled themselves down.

“Scar the killer crocodile,” Abby agreed.

Then I tucked them both under the covers, made a sincere bedtime wish for happy endings for both of them, and flipped off the light. I made my way downstairs with the uneasy feeling that the day had brought some important clues about Abby. I just didn’t know what they were or how to read them.

I said all this to Jean at the kitchen sink as we finished up the dishes. “Don’t put so much pressure on yourself,” she said. “You’re doing fine.”

“I want to be better than fine,” I said. “I want to be perfect.”

Jean shook her head. “You don’t have to be perfect. You just have to try your best.”

I lifted my eyebrows. “That’s what I say to the kids.”

“You say it to the kids,” she said, “but it’s also true.”

She’d surprised me. “I guess that’s a good point.”

“Kids don’t need perfect parents,” Jean said. Then she gestured at me. “You practically raised yourself.”

That was just it. “What if I’d actually had some help?” I said. “Maybe I would have turned out better.”

“But you turned out great!” Jean said.

I shrugged. “I don’t want my kids to be like me. I want them to be better than me.”

“They’re going to be different,” Jean said. “They’re just going
to be their own selves with their own struggles and disappointments and heartbreaks.”

I put my head down on the table and let it churn with worries and unanswered questions. “It’s hard,” I said. “This parenting thing is killing me.”

“Well,” Jean said, patting my arm, “something has to.”

We wound up staying up late. Sometimes conversations get rolling and you just don’t want to stop them. This happened to me often with Jean. Just the act of talking—no matter what we were actually talking about—was a pleasure. In truth, I spent much of my life feeling, if not actually
lonely
, then at least
alone
. “Alone” was my neutral. Even raising kids, surrounded by life and chaos and noise, I carried this feeling around with me most of the time.

I never felt alone when I was talking to Jean, though. It was something about the way she listened—like there was nothing on earth she cared more about than gathering every detail in what I had to say: the way I’d hammered back together that cracked spot in the fence, or the gang of turkey vultures that kept appearing over the barn, or the crazy dream I’d had that human beings walked like chickens, their heads jutting in and out with each step. She found a way to find it interesting. It made me want to follow her around all day the way all the dogs did.

That night we talked until we were bleary-eyed. A topic would burn down to its ashes, and then I’d toss in some kindling and get it going again—until Jean happened to notice the clock. “Dear Lord!” she said. “It’s two in the morning!” She was just flipping off the lights when she added, “And you have to be up early.”

“I do?”

“Tomorrow’s the farmers’ market,” she said.

I’d forgotten. Now that I had the hang of making cheese, the next day I would be going with O’Connor to peddle it. After milking, we’d get up early, pack up the truck, and head in to Houston together to set up shop. It was time for me to learn those ropes. The kids would stay with Jean this time, though once I had my sea legs, Jean said, I could certainly take them with me.

I’d been wanting to ask Jean a question for a while now, and here, at two in the morning, suddenly seemed like as good a time as any. “Can I ask you something about O’Connor?” I asked.

“You can ask,” Jean said.

“Is he married?”

Jean looked over at me.

“He’s got a wedding ring on a chain,” I said. “Is that his wedding ring?”

“I don’t think I’m supposed to talk about that,” Jean said, looking torn.

“Did she die?” I asked, trying not to sound hopeful.

Jean looked at me like she really, really wanted to tell me something, and then she clamped her mouth shut.

“She didn’t die,” I said, as if Jean’s face were a book I was reading aloud. “But she’s out of the picture?”

Jean kept her mouth closed and shook her head.

“She’s not out of the picture?” I asked. “She’s still in the picture?”

Jean gave the tiniest nod, and then she burst out with, “I can’t tell you!”

“You can’t even give me hints?”

Jean shrugged. “Therapist-client confidentiality.”

I sighed. “And you really have to abide by that?”

She nodded. “Just ask him yourself! You’ll be with him all day.”

“Do you think he wants to talk about it?”

“No,” Jean said. “But better him than me.”

I sighed. She really wasn’t going to tell me. It was time to get going. “You don’t want to come along?”

Jean shook her head. “You’ll have your hands full,” she said. “And we’ve got big plans, anyway.”

“Big plans?”

“Goat spa,” she said with a wry smile. “Hoof painting, fur styling, scented candles. That type of thing.”

Chapter 9
 

The next morning, O’Connor and I milked the ladies before dawn, loaded up the cheese in coolers in the back of Jean’s pickup, and took off for Houston. The kids ran after us down the gravel drive in their PJs and slippers, waving as we pulled away.

I waved, too, out the window, until the kids were out of sight.

When I finally sat back against my seat and rolled the window back up, the cab of the truck seemed awfully small. I was used to being with O’Connor—but not in an enclosed space.

I flipped on the radio, which was preset to an oldies station, and a Smokey Robinson song I’d never heard filled up the silence. O’Connor joined in right away, in falsetto, and I leaned my head back to watch him sing.