The Lost Husband (14 page)

Of course, the events of the day at the farmers’ market had not taken us in a sightseeing direction. And now we were zooming back toward Atwater as fast as Jean’s old truck would let us. It shimmied like it was on the spin cycle, and, as I snuck glances at O’Connor, I wondered if he was trying to put as much distance between himself and the scene of the crime as possible.

Something about his body language—the way he held his profile so still, maybe—told me he was regretting that pretend kiss. Or at least thinking about regretting it. I shifted in my seat and stole another glance at him, and just as I did, he said, “I think it was the right thing to do.”

“I agree,” I said, wanting to establish it as a fact.

“I don’t think Erin would mind.”

“Erin?” I asked. In all these weeks, no one had mentioned an Erin. But it wasn’t hard to guess who she might be. “Is Erin your—” I began, and then didn’t finish the question. I could tell from his face who she was. She was the person who had given him that ring on the necklace. Whatever I was asking, she was it.

“She’s injured,” he said. “She was in a car accident, and now she requires …” He paused, searching for the right words. “A lot of care.”

I didn’t voice the questions in my head.
What kind of accident? What kind of care?
Jean was right. The questions I really wanted answers to were exactly the ones I couldn’t ask. I had to take the information he offered and let that be enough.

“Anyway,” he went on, “Erin would get it.”

“Good,” I said.

“It was just acting,” he said.

“Yes,” I agreed. Very good acting. Oscar-worthy.

“And also,” he said, “honestly, I just don’t think of you that way.”

My heart clamped down a little. “Of course not.”

“And Erin would know that,” he went on. “You’re not my type at all.”

I nodded. “Okay.”

“At all,” he said again.

“Well, you’re certainly not my type, Grizzly Adams.”

“That’s right.” He was building momentum now. “We’re not each other’s types. But you’re a nice person, and you were in need of help.”

I nodded. Both true.

“And Erin hates mean people,” he added. “She’d have loved the expression on that woman’s face.”

“Her expression,” I said, trying to infuse the words with the enormous gratitude I felt, “was absolutely priceless.”

After a moment I said, “Are you going to tell her?”

“No!” he said. Then, a little quieter, “She wouldn’t—” He cut himself off and just shook his head. “No.”

“I don’t think Danny would have minded, either,” I said, to cover the silence.

“That was your husband? Danny?”

I nodded.

I’d assumed that O’Connor knew all about Danny, but now it occurred to me that Jean may not have told him any more about my life than she’d told me about his. “He was killed in a car accident three years ago,” I said.

O’Connor nodded but didn’t prompt me to say any more. Which I appreciated.

Maybe it was the fact that he didn’t ask me about it—the uncharacteristic lack of pressure to reveal the heartbreaking details—but, for the first time ever, I found myself volunteering information about what had happened and how, exactly, I had lost him.

“We were in the middle of a fight at the time,” I heard myself say. “And he’d gone to pick up Abby from art camp, and as they were pulling out of the parking lot onto an access road, they got broadsided by a pickup truck.” Then I added, “An uninsured pickup truck.” A fact that hadn’t seemed very important that day
but, as my financial life collapsed, turned out to be one of the most important details of all.

I ran my fingers along the window glass as I talked. “Abby was buckled in, of course, but Danny didn’t have his seatbelt on yet. It was one of those things I nagged him about. He always waited, like, half a block before he buckled his seat belt. It made me crazy. Why not just buckle first and then drive? It takes two seconds! But he thought it was a waste of time.”

I crossed my legs and sat up straighter in my seat. “The paramedic from the ambulance said the truck must have been going about twice the speed limit to do so much damage,” I went on. “Danny’s Jeep was totaled.”

I found myself staring at my hands. It was so strange to just sum it all up in this way. “He died before they reached the hospital.”

O’Connor nodded.

I took a breath. “When I got there, they told me Danny was dead. Though they never actually said the words. A doctor took me aside and told me his injuries were ‘very extensive.’ I asked what that meant, and he just said there was a lot of internal bleeding. It was like he wouldn’t say it. Like I had to be the one to say it.

“So I pushed past the doctor and started to go looking for Danny. I still had Tank in my arms. I didn’t believe it. It was like, if Danny was dead, he could damn well tell me himself. Before I got anywhere, though, a nurse in SpongeBob scrubs appeared out of nowhere and took me by the shoulders and told me what I really needed to do, more than anything, was to pray for my little girl. I don’t know if she was right or wrong, but I did what she said. I let her lead Tank and me to the waiting area for the OR, and then I prayed like hell.

“And this sounds crazy, but I always think about that very short time when I didn’t completely believe them about Danny being dead as a time when he wasn’t entirely and completely gone yet. I keep wondering: If I’d gone to him right then, instead of turning my attention to Abby—if I’d held on to him just a little harder and flat out refused to let him go—could it have helped? Could it have changed anything?”

“No,” O’Connor said.

I looked over at him, pulling myself back to my present life so fast that it was almost a surprise to see him there.

He met my eyes. “No. It would not have changed anything.”

Something had changed in his expression.

“Of course not,” I said. “I know.”

“I used to be a firefighter,” O’Connor went on. “I’ve seen a lot of car accidents. If they told you he was dead, there was no changing anything.”

The way he talked, it was like he knew more about what happened that day than I did. Which he probably did, in a way. I’d certainly never been to the scene of a car accident. I’d never witnessed something like that for real. Just a thousand times in my imagination. Which isn’t the same thing.

It was weird to think that O’Connor could see the story I was telling better than I could myself. It was as though he’d crowded himself into my memory of that hallway in that hospital. Yet if I’m honest, part of me liked having him there—and liked not always having to live the memory the way I had that day, so completely alone.

“I didn’t know you were a firefighter,” I said after a bit.

“Used to be,” he said.

We drove on a little longer, and it was a few minutes before I noticed how quiet he was. My thoughts drifted back to Danny, his
memory now refreshed in my mind. “He really was a good man,” I said in a small voice.

O’Connor seemed to intuit that I was ready to talk about something else. “And what is that?” he asked. “A ‘good man’?”

“Well,” I said, leaning back a little and letting out a breath. “A good man buys you tampons when you run out. He does the dishes. He makes you coffee before you’re awake in the morning. He listens to you when you’re talking, even if it’s about home décor. He goes out of his way to touch you, even if it’s just your hand. He doesn’t call it ‘babysitting’ when he looks after his own children. He calls you from work just to hear your voice. And he always thinks you’re beautiful, even—no,
especially
—when you don’t.”

“That’s a tall order,” O’Connor said, letting out a whistle.

I turned my head toward his and studied his profile. “What’s your definition?” He lifted one hand off the wheel and reached back to rub his neck. I kept expecting him to start talking, but he didn’t.

“Well?” I said.

“I’m thinking.”

I waited a little longer, trying to picture what his face would look like without his beard, until at last he said, “A good man does the right thing, even when it just about kills him.”

I let my gaze skim up from his beard along his profile. When nothing more came, I said, “So? Are you a good man?”

“I try like hell,” he said. “I’ll say that for myself.”

We both smiled at that, and then O’Connor said, “I haven’t kissed anyone other than Erin in ten years.”

“I haven’t kissed anyone other than Danny in fifteen.”

“No?” He glanced over. “Not even—lately?”

“I know I’m not married,” I said. “But I don’t exactly feel single,
either.” I looked over. “You know how when you commit to somebody, you, like, take down your antenna for other people?”

O’Connor nodded.

“I haven’t been able to put mine back up.”

He nodded some more, like he really got that. “And even if you could,” he added, “you wouldn’t want to.”

“Exactly,” I said, though I wasn’t being completely truthful. My antenna might not have been entirely up and running, but it wasn’t quite broken, either. The pretend kiss had cleared that right up.

I said, “Was it weird for you?”

He knew what I meant. “Yes,” he said.

“The facial hair was a new twist for me.”

“For me, too.”

“And you taste like cider,” I added.

He shrugged. “I drank your cup.”

“Thanks for saving me, by the way.”

“No problem,” he said. “But I don’t think we should mention it to anybody.”

“Of course,” I said, though I hadn’t thought about it.

Jessica Boone was probably on speakerphone telling everyone she knew right that minute. There was no changing that. All I could do was respond to the moment at hand, and to the person who had stood up for me when I really, really needed it.

If O’Connor wanted it forgotten, it was forgotten. As much as something that good ever could be.

Chapter 12
 

After that, O’Connor and I were officially pals. I had needed to be rescued that day, and he had needed someone to rescue, and the symmetry of it—not to mention our common enemy, Jessica Boone—paved the way for a harmonious cheese-centered friendship.

For about a week.

Until the following Friday, the first of March, when I got a call from Abby’s teacher at school, saying Abby had been fighting on the playground. And by “fighting,” she meant the real thing:
fisticuffs
fighting. Abby apparently had used a serious self-defense move on a boy in her class named Jimmy Gaveski and had punched him in the stomach so hard that he peed in his pants.

“It was quite crippling,” the teacher said. “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“Are you sure it was Abby?” I asked. “She doesn’t even hit her brother.”

“It was Abby,” the teacher confirmed, “and she is suspended from school today. Please come pick her up.”

On my way out to the minivan, I ran into O’Connor.

“Did you teach Abby how to fistfight when you were doing self-defense?” I asked.

“You betcha,” he said. “How to make a proper fist. Where to aim. Yep.”

“She just punched a kid at school,” I said, in a
how-could-you
tone of voice. “And now she’s suspended for the day.”

O’Connor nodded with appreciation. “Suspended for fighting.”

“She really hurt this kid, O’Connor,” I said. “He wet himself.”

He shrugged. “The girl’s got moxie.”

“Are you insane?” I said. “She’s eight years old!”

“She said she was getting picked on,” O’Connor told me. “And I didn’t think she should just have to sit there and take it.”

I stared at him. “She was getting picked on?”

He nodded.

My mind spun back through the past several months, looking for clues I should have noticed sooner. I thought about how often she’d asked to stay home from school this year. Why hadn’t it raised a red flag? “Who?” I demanded. “Who is picking on her?”

“The boy she just beat the crap out of, I imagine.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?” I asked, my voice shocked into a kind of whisper.

“She asked me not to.”

“That’s not a reason!” I said. “You don’t keep information like that from a child’s mother.”

“I was helping her handle it,” he said.

“It’s not your place to help her do anything!”

“Hey,” he said. “She came to me.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“She probably knew you’d freak out,” he said. “Like you’re doing right now.”

It was time to go. Abby was waiting in the principal’s office. “Yeah!” I said, getting in the car. “I’m freaking out. She’s in second grade!”

“She can handle herself,” O’Connor called after me.

“Stay out of it, O’Connor!” I shouted out the window as the minivan spat gravel down the driveway.

I expected to find Abby at the principal’s office with her head down in shame. When I saw her, though, she was on a wooden bench by the nurse’s office reading a book about mermaids. Someone had given her a lollipop.

I guess I was expecting her to suddenly look like a tough kid. But she was just her sweet, usual self.

She raised her hand when she saw me. “Hi, Mom.”

I squinted at her. I couldn’t read her feelings. Was she guilty and sorry? Was she triumphant? I couldn’t tell. I said, “You punched a kid?”