The Sweetheart Deal (17 page)

“Since before Leo and I got married, more than twenty years,” I said. “We met because Leo and I were together.”

“Could you imagine having married anyone other than Leo?” Father said.

“No, of course not, no one,” I said.

“And you wouldn't know Garrett without having married Leo?” Father John said.

“No, I don't think I would,” I said.

Father John sat and waited. Maybe we would both just sit there until some shift took place inside of me.

“That's not all,” I said. “I feel like I'm deceiving the boys. But they wouldn't understand.”

“I think there's a difference between deception and privacy, when it comes to parents and their children,” said Father John. “That's obviously something for you to think about, your honesty with the boys. But you and Garrett are consenting adults. But keep in mind, if they knew, what would you tell them?”

“I really don't know,” I said. “I don't have any idea.”

“You don't have to know today,” he said. “But it's something to think about.”

“Yes,” I said. “Of course it is.”

“Please, Audrey, you keep that for a while.” He pointed to the frame I was still holding. “When I need it back, I'll know where to find it. And I know you know this, but you can come talk to me anytime.”

I lay the frame on my lap, and we said the Our Father before I left. When I got to my car, I sat in the parking lot and read the poem over and over, so many times I lost count. After I got home, I put it in my closet next to Leo's boots. Like Father, I'd know where to find it.

W
hen I got home from school, Garrett and Kevin were putting in the floor. I pulled back the plastic hanging in the kitchen doorway to check it out, and Kevin saw me and stood up.

“Hey, Brian,” he said, “I brought you something. It's in the car. Be right back.”

When he returned, he handed me a frame with my drawing of my dad. It didn't have the mat with the signatures around it.

“We made a copy and hung that up,” he said. “It looks just as good. We wanted you to have yours back. It's not mounted, so you can take it out if you want.”

“Thanks,” I said. I didn't know why, even after finding out what had happened to the drawing and deciding it could stay at the station, it still made me so miserable. Just sad, really. It was just a drawing. You wouldn't think a drawing could mess you up like that. Especially one that you'd drawn yourself.

“Come to the station again when you can,” said Kevin. “You won't even be able to tell the difference I bet. I'm glad we have it. It's what we should have done in the first place. We just weren't thinking straight.”

“Sure, okay, thanks,” I said.

I took the frame up to my room and took the drawing out. I rolled it up and put a rubber band around it, loose. I put it on the high shelf in my closet. I'd deal with it later. At least now I not only knew where it was, but had it back. I changed my clothes to go running.

It was my mom's idea. My terrible dreams hadn't been bad for a while, not for at least a month. My mom thought playing basketball had helped and said maybe running would too, so I started going with her. It was easy. She went slower than I wanted to but she said running slower meant you could go for longer without getting winded. So I ran slow like she did and we'd go like three miles in a half hour. Sometimes I went by myself and went faster, and she was right, I couldn't go as far. I still did it, but I didn't feel great. I felt like falling over flat and dying on the sidewalk. My mom wasn't always right, just most of the time.

She stuck her head in my room. “Are you ready to go?”

“Yeah,” I said.

“You're not wiped out from school?” she said.

“Nah,” I said. “I'm fine. I'll be right down. Anything in the mail today?”

“Not today,” she said. “I'm looking too.”

Every day I was checking the mail. I had registered for the summer pre-college program at Portland Northwest College of Art, where I'd taken some classes when I was a little kid, and I hoped I'd get accepted even though I wouldn't be in high school until next year. I wanted to learn more stuff than they taught at my school.

She was stretching on the porch. I never stretched beforehand, but she always made me afterward. “What do you say we go four today?” she said. “If you can stand to crawl along with me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “Four's no problem.”

I
'd been sleeping with Audrey for almost a month.
We'd
been sleeping together for almost a month. The boys didn't know, I was certain. And every time seemed like the first time, in the best possible way. We were tentative at first, like there was still time to stop, then we got to a point where there was no turning back, and neither of us wanted to. Three rare nights, I stayed and slept with her until four-thirty, when the alarm on my phone went off. I listened for the all quiet before I left her bed and crept back downstairs to the guest room, where I lay still but never resumed sleeping. She spent one night with me in the guest room.

Sometimes she talked in her sleep and it was mostly gibberish, but one night she was very articulate.
Sorry, I said I'm sorry
. It was only two o'clock, but I got up and went downstairs, turned off my phone, and went back to sleep. And the nights Brian woke up screaming and Audrey ran into his room, I went downstairs for the rest of those nights too, no matter what time it was after I helped Audrey with him, if she needed it.

Each time was different, but I started the same way—it's what I couldn't help. The first thing I always kissed, after her mouth, after I traced it with my finger, was her clavicle—such a pretty word, so much more so than
collarbone
—and it was one of my favorite parts of her. Even before we went to bed the first time, I found myself again and again looking at her clavicle, bypassing her neck, whenever I got the chance to gaze without gawking. I couldn't help but think how many other men in the world noticed it and looked as long as they could too, and I wondered if it had been one of Leo's favorite parts of his wife.

We were covert, like two people having an affair, and the secrecy fueled our momentum. Playing house around everyone else, we were like coworkers or roommates, doing what life needed us to get done, side by side. There were a handful of days when the boys were at school when we were in bed more than we were out of it. Afterward, I napped, she slept curled behind me, and we showered and got back into bed. The sex was like drinking or getting high, a fleeting and artificial respite from the sadness and disorientation we were all trying to manage. But what we stole when we were alone clung to me in the best way, and made me work better, with more care and investment.

Despite all those chances I had—in bed and out of it, out to lunch and in the house, both of us working, so many opportunities—I rejected each one. I didn't know how to tell her what Leo had made me promise. If she could have read my mind, she would have known. Every day she would have seen the truth, in front of and dominating every other thought I had. It wasn't a blind decision and I felt justified: too much time had passed and too much had happened between us for me to share it now:
Oh,
by the way
. Like an apology for which the time and need expire and after which expressing contrition can cause more harm than good. And although I didn't know how Audrey was doing what she was doing with me, she was doing it nonetheless, either purely of her own accord, or maybe Leo had asked her for her own agreement. Regardless, what was happening was, in the most fragile way, a kind of prelude to what he had asked of me, and I thought the less we said about it, the better. Audrey and I never talked about what we were doing—we just did it, as if we'd silently agreed to continue, without comment, what we'd started. The deeper I got, the more I resolved to keep my mouth shut.

One day when I was working alone, she came into the room and without saying a thing, stood in front of me, laced her fingers behind my neck, and pulled me toward her as she backed up against one of the addition walls. I pushed her skirt up, pulled her panties down, and dropped everything I was wearing from the waist down.

“I think it's a matter of responsibility,” I whispered into her ear as we crushed against a wall that months before hadn't existed. “To see how much these walls can take.”

In the middle of it all she whispered, “They can take more.” And it was true; the walls took an awful lot that day.

Another: When she was at the sink one afternoon, I walked up behind her and gave her ass a light tap, then rested my palm against its curve before I slid the fabric of her sundress up then tucked my hand inside her lace waistband and against her skin. I kissed the base of her neck until she started reaching back for me, and that's how we stayed, start to finish, with her looking out the window over the sink and my face in her hair the whole time. She never even turned around until we were done, and we kissed then, until our mouths were raw, then both went back to work. The boys were home from school an hour later.

And more. I came back from Lowe's one morning and as soon as I closed the front door behind me, she texted,
Upstairs
.

I took the steps two at a time. Audrey was lying on her back on her bed, fully clothed except for panties, and her skirt was pushed up and wrinkled over her hips.

“Where have you been?” She had a wicked little look on her face. “I got started but I've been waiting for you to finish.”

Only a fool would have done anything to ruin it.

It wasn't always like that. Sometimes while the boys were at school we danced in the kitchen or the living room or in the new room, to whatever I was listening to. It was very innocent—for whatever reason, dancing was never a prelude to sex for us—but still we never danced together in front of the boys. I'd wrap her up and we'd move and sway like a couple of kids. Sometimes she was happy and smiled and gazed at me like a girl, but sometimes she rested her head on my shoulder and when we separated there would be a wet spot on my shirt and she'd creep away without looking at me. I'd go back to work, but I brushed my fingers along my shoulder, fingering the spot until it dried.

We didn't—couldn't—have dates, nighttime ones, anyway, but we had a lot of nice lunches out. We never touched in public but Audrey would have two glasses of Pinot gris and I'd have a few beers, and those afternoons felt like courting—with all its chemistry and tension—that would lead a couple to do what we'd already done before we'd left the house. Occasionally we saw people we knew, or Audrey knew, when we were out for those lunches, just as we'd seen that classmate of Christopher's and her mother when we went out that first time. That was a far cry from where we were now. But neither of us ever did anything affectionate while we were out—there was nothing questionable between us for anyone to consider or interpret.

The boys had gotten cards on their own for Mother's Day, but they asked me to take them to the nursery the day before, which I did, and the neighbors let us hide her gift in their yard.

“We're buying her a eucalyptus,” Andrew said. “She loves how they smell. And she loves the leaves.”

I'd gotten Audrey my own card and I'd written inside,
You're the best mom I know,
and signed only my name.

The next morning I went next door and got the pot and brought it into the backyard. The boys blindfolded Audrey with one of her own bandannas. I didn't have any part in that.

“Come on, Mom,” Andrew said, and took one of her arms. Brian took the other and she reached up with her hands to grasp theirs. Chris had his hands on her shoulders and, with care, they all steered her down the stairs, through the addition, and outside. I watched the four of them.

They walked her right up to the small tree and she giggled the whole time.

“Reach out,” Andrew said.

Audrey pawed the air, blind.

“No, here,” said Andrew. He helped her hand find a leaf.

“Rub it,” Brian said. Her right index finger and thumb worked the leaf.

“Now smell!” Andrew cheered.

She lifted her hand to her face and inhaled and pushed back the bandanna and blinked at the tree.

“Oh, you guys,” she said. “It's so beautiful, thank you.” She caressed some of the leaves with her open palm. “This is perfect. How did you know?”

“We just did,” said Andrew, the proud ambassador.

She hugged him then, and Brian and Chris too, and she patted and rubbed my forearm.

“Thanks so much,” she said, “all of you. Thank you, Garrett.”

We were so pleased with ourselves.

“Where should we put it?” she said.

And they chimed in with their suggestions.

On Father's Day, we all went back to the nursery and bought plants for Leo. The five of us worked together to scoop out dirt around the gravestone where Audrey told us to, and put the periwinkles and poppies in the holes we'd made. She had cut five eucalyptus branches from her tree and laid them at the base of the marker. We were all quiet while we followed her directions, but the day was sunny and the traffic of other visitors streamed in and out of the cemetery. I dug and filled my own holes, and at intervals watched other people visiting their own lost beloveds, passengers in the same boat. While Audrey collected the empty plastic pots and gardening tools and the boys gave the new plants one final check and poured water on them from the gallon bottles we'd brought, I took a rubbing of the five words beneath Leo's name. On a piece of paper I'd taken from the printer at the house, I rubbed
Friend
first—the last word on the list—with the fat pencil I'd found among Leo's things in the addition. I skimmed the graphite over the depressions of the letters shading the paper until the word surfaced on the page before I rendered the other four. I folded the rubbing and tucked it in my wallet. I made no effort to conceal doing it, but I didn't say anything and neither did anyone else. When we left, although none of us was happy, we all seemed satisfied to have done a good and simple thing.

I taught Christopher to drive and told him the story of the summer afternoon Leo and I had taken my mother's car before I'd gotten my license. My dad was at work and my mom was supposed to be at my grandmother's house for the afternoon with my aunt. Leo and I were driving down one of the main streets in Radnor, and at the exact moment I saw my mom and my aunt in my aunt's car driving in the opposite direction, my mom saw Leo and me in hers. Chris and I laughed, but I told him, “Don't ever pull that sneaky shit with your mom. Never take the car without asking. I paid for that for a long, long time.” After enough time on the road with me, Christopher passed his test and got his license. That was a big day.

That's how it went as I got in deeper and deeper. When the warm of spring ripened into the hot of summer—bittersweet, the closer I got to finishing the work—and when, after all the time I'd spent, I started to think of the addition as mine.