The Lost Husband (16 page)

“You think that,” I said, “because you don’t have kids.”

He shook his head. “That’s bullshit.”

“I dare you,” I said, “to live my life for one hour and not go crazy with worry.”

“I’d be great at your life,” O’Connor said.

“Really.”

“I’d make all kinds of improvements.”

“Like?”

“I’d sing more,” he said. “I’d ask for help when I needed it. I’d do nice things for my coworkers, like bake them cakes and give them presents.” Then he eyed me. “And I’d chill the hell out about Abby.”

“You really don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“The world is full of kids like PeePants,” O’Connor said. “How is she ever going to learn to deal with them if she doesn’t get any practice?”

“She shouldn’t
have
to deal with them!” I said.

“She shouldn’t have to, but she will.”

He was so wrong, I didn’t even know how to explain it. “Normal playground stuff,” I said, “that’s fine. I get it. But a kid calling her Limper? That’s unacceptable.”

O’Connor shrugged. “She punched him in the solar plexus,” he said, as if no other solution were needed.

“Violence,” I said, as I told the kids just about every day, “is not the answer.”

“What
is
the answer?” O’Connor challenged.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I’m going to figure it out if it kills me.”

When we got back to the farm, Jean and the kids were out in the yard with tinfoil hats on their heads. “Mama!” the kids shouted when they saw the truck pull into the yard. They ran
to meet us, the dogs and goats trotting behind. I had to work my way through the herd to get to the kids, and while we were hugging, I heard Jean speak to O’Connor in a grave voice.

“I’ve been trying to get you on your phone,” she said.

O’Connor swung the truck door shut. “I forgot to charge it.”

“There’s a problem with Erin,” Jean said, and then they both looked over and waited for the kids and me to make ourselves scarce.

I herded the children over to the tire swings and satisfied myself with occasional glances over toward Jean and O’Connor, huddled in intense discussion. I strained my ears to listen, but I couldn’t catch anything more than the hum of voices.

It was a long wait to get the scoop. It wasn’t until after bedtime that Jean gave me the basics—the parts, at least, that affected me. The neighbor who’d been looking after Erin while O’Connor was at work had had a stroke that morning. She was in the hospital and doing well, but she would not be coming back to help him, even after her recovery period. That neighbor had been helping out for close to free, and O’Connor could not afford another caretaker.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“That means he’s going to have to do it himself,” Jean said.

And so, I realized with a little drop in my stomach, we’d be seeing a lot less of him here at Jean’s place.

“What’s wrong with her?” I asked.

Jean frowned at me. “You know she was in a car accident?”

I nodded.

“Well,” Jean said, “she’s paralyzed now. Even worse, she’s just kind of gone. She can hear sounds but not process language. She can see things but not read faces. She’s awake, but she’s in her own world.”

I sighed. “With no hope of returning?”

Jean shook her head. “There was some hope early on. Not anymore, though.” She poured hot water for tea. “She can’t be left alone at all.”

I studied Jean’s face to see if things were as bad as they seemed.

“But O’Connor can still help with the milking, right?” I asked.

Jean shook her head. “Not unless he finds someone to help him—someone he can afford.”

“He’s not going to be here at all anymore?” I asked.

“Not until he figures something out.”

“What’s he going to live on? How’s he going to make it?” I asked, fully expecting that Jean would know.

“Honestly,” she said, frowning, “I really have no idea.”

And so that evening I did the milking by myself—which took twice as long and felt twice as lonesome. I missed O’Connor’s help, and I also missed his noise. The milking barn was awfully quiet with only the sound of that terrible machine filling it up. Where were O’Connor’s a cappella renditions of “Stairway to Heaven,” or “Hound Dog,” or “More Than a Woman” in Bee Gees falsetto?

The barn felt darker and the work took longer, and out of desperation I even tried a little singing myself: Patsy Cline, in my best tribute voice. Which really just made things worse. The goats looked at me as though I’d gone mad. If they’d been able to place their hooves over their ears, they would have. After a while I asked Eleanor Roosevelt to convey my formal apology to the other girls, and we finished the rest of our work in silence.

Over the next week or so, Jean started many projects with the kids, including helping Tank write his own comic book series, sewing Abby-designed collars for the goats, and building, of all things, a treehouse.

Given the arthritis that was making it impossible for Jean to do the farm chores, it seemed like a fairly impossible undertaking when she first mentioned it one night at dinner.

“But how are you going to build it?” I asked.

Jean shrugged. “I’ll delegate.”

“Who are you going to delegate to?” I asked. “I’m working 24/7, O’Connor’s gone. Who’s left?”

“The children,” Jean said, as if my kids built play structures in trees all the time. “And Russ can help. He’s always looking for an excuse to come over.”

It sounded vastly overambitious to me.

“It’s going to be great,” Jean said, in that convincing way she had. They’d already been collecting sticks and rocks and old coffee cans for a totem pole. Jean had some construction-grade timber stored in one of the barns. “And if it’s a disaster,” she said, reading my mind, “that’ll be okay, too. We’ll have had fun trying.”

Truth be told, I worried less that they wouldn’t get it done than that they would. The tree they’d picked was enormous. What if one of the kids fell out? What if the thing collapsed? Why on earth did people always have to go looking for trouble?

I didn’t ask that question, though. I already knew how Jean would have answered it:
“Don’t let worrying get in your way.”
She’d said it to me countless times since we’d arrived—her own folksy take on carpe diem.

In fact, for everyone’s own good, Jean and the kids had started doing dangerous things I never allowed—but doing them behind
my back. Like swimming, for example. Since Danny died, I had only allowed the children to swim during lessons with a qualified instructor. I never took them myself, because there was no way I could watch both of them at the exact same time. I’d once read in a child-safety article the words “drowning is silent”—meaning don’t expect your kids to splash and call for help if they start to drown, because they won’t. You’ll just turn to ask a friend about her vacation in Italy and your child will slip into a liquid grave. That’s what I thought of when I thought of “swimming.” Not splashing in the water, or tossing a beach ball, or the lovely weightlessness you feel in water. I thought of death. People who suggested I take the kids swimming might as well have suggested I take them
drowning
.

Jean didn’t understand it. “When you were a little kid, you ran completely free,” Jean said. “And you’re fine.”

“I’m not fine!” I said. “And you know I didn’t run completely free—not with a mother like Marsha.”

Jean almost said something, but then she closed her mouth.

“Look,” I said, “I don’t care about me thirty years ago. I care about these guys now. And if I have to give up some fun to keep them alive, I will.”

Anger sparked in Jean’s face. “You don’t get to raise them in straitjackets, Marsha.” Then she turned and marched up the hill toward the house.

I followed. “Hey!” I shouted. “Hey! You just called me ‘Marsha.’ ”

Jean paused and turned back. “Did I?” she said, as if she hadn’t noticed. Then she put her hands on her hips. “Well, you’re acting just like her!”

And there was the trump card. Calling me Marsha. In that moment, without even speaking a word, we enacted a don’t-ask-don’t-tell
policy on what Jean did with the kids. When she was in charge, she got to be in charge. And if they did anything other than sit quietly in the library and read, I didn’t want to know about it.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Jean said about the tree house at dinner that night. “And I’m very proud of you for not saying anything.”

“I’m fighting with myself something fierce,” I said.

“Good girl,” she said. “Keep up the fight.”

The sun was setting. We were at the red kitchen table with a spring breeze blowing through the screen door. Jean had barbecued ribs for dinner and convinced the kids to pretend they were lions devouring the meat of their prey. She had taught them the words
“devour”
and
“prey,”
too—along with
“carnivore”
—which sounded so funny coming out of their mouths.

“Has anyone noticed me
devouring
my
prey
?” Tank kept asking, his face covered in barbecue sauce.

And Abby piped up with statements like, “I am
devouring
my corn on the cob, too, even though I am a
carnivore
.”

The kids had so much sauce on their hands they looked like they’d been finger-painting with it. After an entire day of working in Jean’s garden and building mud forts and tumbling around the farmyard, they were filthy—covered in grass stains and dirt smudges. But they looked wonderful. Taller and leaner than when we’d arrived. And happier.

I was admiring them when we heard a car pull up outside, tires popping the gravel on the driveway. My eyes met Jean’s. It might have been Russ, scavenging for dinner. It might have been Sunshine, doing the same. Or—and I found myself involuntarily snapping to attention at this idea—it might have been O’Connor.

It was too dark now to see out the window. We kept eating as
the car door slammed, footsteps crossed the gravel and knocked up the steps, and someone appeared under the porch light at the back door. We turned to look, and there, in high heels and pantyhose, with the exact expression she might have worn if she were standing on the steps of a crack house, was my mother.

Jean froze, and so did the kids. Something about the way she appeared out of the blackness—and the shadows the light from above cast on her face—made her seem far more terrifying than any visiting grandmother ever ought to be.

After a pause, Jean seemed to make a choice to go back to eating. “Screen’s unlatched,” she said, not as an invitation, but to make sure my mother knew that she wasn’t going to interrupt her own dinner to open the door.

I stood up as my mom stepped in. “Hi, Mom.”

She edged carefully into the room, as if she might get ambushed at any minute. The kids tried to move in for a hug, but my mom backed away when she saw their sauce-covered hands and faces. I intercepted quickly, as I was always doing, to cover. “Let’s save those sweet hugs for Grandma,” I said, “until after you’ve had your bath.”

I wiped them down a little with my own napkin and herded them outside to sit on the porch swing for “one minute only.”

A good thing, too, because the screen door had barely smacked closed when Jean said to my mother, “I don’t know what you think you’re doing here, Marsha. But you are not welcome.”

“I’m here to see my
daughter
,” my mother said. “And my
grandchildren
.”

“She may be your daughter,” Jean said, “but this is my house. And you’ve got five minutes before I drag you out of it by the pantyhose.”

Jean followed the kids to the porch. I had never seen her talk to
anybody like that. I had never heard her voice so low and threatening. There was really only one word for it:
hatred
. It wasn’t air that was moving through her vocal cords right then. It was hatred.

My mother shrugged it off. As soon as Jean was out, she turned right to me, all snappy and businesslike.

“I’m here to bring you home,” she said.

“I thought you had disowned me,” I said.

“That’s ridiculous.”

“You told me that if I came here, then I was no longer your daughter.”

“I never said that.”

I knew she’d deny it. Denying things was her signature move.

She waved her hands, as if to fast-forward the conversation. “You can come home now,” she said again, as if spelling out the obvious.

“Mom,” I said, “I don’t
want
to come home.”

She wasn’t listening. “Let’s move quick, before she gets her shotgun. Or sets the goats on us.”

I sighed. “We’re not leaving. We’re fine here.”

She wasn’t about to believe it. “I don’t know what I’ve done to make you so rebellious and angry—”

“I am not rebellious! Or angry!”

“Look at you,” she went on. “In those overalls! You’re filthy. Your children are filthy! You’re living in a—” She looked around. “In a hovel! You must hate me so bitterly to keep yourself here.”

“This is not about you!” I said. But it was useless. As far as my mother was concerned, everything was about her. If I was five minutes late, I didn’t love her enough to be on time. If a TV show got canceled, the network didn’t want her to be happy. If a traffic light turned red, the universe was slowing her down. I knew that. She’d never been any different. She just couldn’t conceive of a
world that didn’t make its choices based on how those choices made her feel.