Things We Didn't Say (20 page)

“Of course. And I’m going to, with him.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Mom—”

“He’s got teenagers, and he’s what, thirty-five?”

“Thirty-six.”

“I guarantee you he’s reaching the end of his rope with kids, especially after this. Would you be willing to give up ever having a baby of your own, to stay with him? Is he worth that?”

“I can’t talk about this right now.”

“I just don’t want to see you throw away your youth by making your life harder than it has to be. Don’t do it just to win him. This is not some TV show with the guy as the prize.”

“So we’re watching
The Bachelor
again, are we? Will you give me a break, please? We’ve been through hell, here.”

“I’m so sorry my TV watching isn’t up to your lofty standards.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I thought that’s why you bolted town, to go off and live your dreams. This is what you dreamed of? Teenage stepkids who run away and sneer at you?”

“You make it sound so awful.”

“I’m only repeating what you tell me. Why don’t you call Pete? He misses you. We all do.”

“That’s what this is really about. You don’t like that I left.”

“Of course I don’t. I miss my children.”

I suck in a breath at her phrasing, comparing my absence and Billy’s. “I’m right here, on the phone.”

“And never here where I can see you. Are you eating? You sound thin.”

Despite it all, I have to laugh. “I
sound
thin?”

My mom laughs, too, and the tension falls away like leaves from an autumn tree.

“I hate to see it so hard for you,” she says, her voice softer, still warm with laughter.

“Life isn’t supposed to be easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

“Smartass.”

“My ass has never been smarter.”

We banter like this for a few more minutes and talk about my cousin’s baby’s party and how it’s been rescheduled because of the storm, and while I keep up the prattle I’m entertaining my mother’s question to me: Would I choose Michael if it meant giving up having babies?

Shortly after Michael proposed, we were up late flipping channels while the kids slept. The fire was lit and the room was dark and the ruddy light danced across his face. I kept turning the ring around and around on my finger.

Steel Magnolias
was on. Julia Roberts and Sally Field were fighting over Julia wanting to have a baby, despite her character’s delicate medical condition. Michael was about to flip past, but I took the remote out of his hand.

“I understand that,” I told him. “Wanting to have a baby of her own.”

“Real subtle, Casey,” he said, smirking at me and taking the remote back.

“I was just talking about the movie.” Such a reporter. Always suspecting ulterior motives.

“But you do want to have a baby.” He said this matter-of-factly, flipping to a poker tournament on one of the ESPNs.

I shrugged, trying to act like I could take it or leave it, like he’d asked if I wanted some popcorn. It had taken a lot for Michael to risk getting married again. I feared if I pressured him, he would bolt like a skittish horse.

He playfully nudged me. “C’mon, you have baby radar. If there’s a baby within a mile of you, you’ll find it and start playing peekaboo.”

“I’m practicing for the peekaboo championship.”

“So you
don’t
want a baby with a broken-down old man like me?”

I was almost afraid to look at him, but I dared it. He was smiling at me softly.

“Well, I guess if you can manage it,” I said.

He kissed my forehead. “I think I’d manage just fine.” He moved on to my neck. “I’ll have a baby with you.”

I shivered with delight as he continued kissing my neck.

Then he said, “It would make a nice change to make a baby with someone not crazy.”

The delicious shivers evaporated, and I moved away from the reach of his lips. He looked at me with a wrinkled brow.

“I think I hear a kid on the steps,” I lied.

I know it was a favorable comparison. I know I should have ignored it and kissed him back. But his ex-wife, his old life, seeped always into our most intimate moments.

And now she’s here. In our house.

I hang up from my mother and return to the fridge to rummage for some dinner. The children will be hungry soon, and life must go on.

Chapter 26
Michael

T
he leather interior of my dad’s Navigator makes me feel like a dwarf. I’m not short, but compared to how cramped I feel in the hand-me-down Honda, there could be a conga line in here.

“Go on, lean the seat back,” my dad tells me. “Get some rest.”

At the push of a button the seat glides down soundlessly.

I jerk back to consciousness with my mouth feeling pasty and my stomach roiling with the confusing motion of rolling along while everything in my sight is stationary. For a few seconds I don’t understand any of it.

Then my nap amnesia wears off. Dylan. Casey and Mallory at home with the girls.

“Where are we?” I ask Dad.

Now I understand what woke me up. We’ve slowed dramatically, and can see little through the windshield but taillights and snow so thick it’s like a wall.

My father is tense on the wheel, his mustache twitching, eyes narrow as he searches for passage.

The appeal of a big vehicle has never been clearer.

“We’re only to Ann Arbor,” he says.

He was right to drive me. I never could have been alert enough to manage this alone. I’d have caused a hundred-car pileup by now.

I consider telling him this, but he knows he’s right. It must be nice to have such confidence.

My cell phone rings, and I snatch it up, visions of disaster at home flicking to life.

It’s Evelyn. My boss.

“Hello, Evelyn. Sorry I didn’t come in today.”

“That’s fine, Michael, we understand. Any news?”

“Yes, he’s in Cleveland and we’re going to get him now. He’s fine.”

“Thank God,” she says, but she says it without emotion. I know her mind is already on the very next thing she has to say. “Look, I hate to talk to you about this over the phone, but rumors are swirling, and as we always tell our readers, it’s best to get the truth at times like this.”

“Yes” is all I can manage.

“We will be offering you a severance package, Michael. Please know it is not in any way personal or a reflection on the work you’ve done for us. There were any number of factors involved, and the decision making was an arduous, complicated process.”

“I’m sure it was. So who else got the ax?”

“Michael—”

“Evelyn. Just tell me.”

She rattles off the list. I notice Kate’s not on it. I would like to be glad for her, but she has no children to support, she’s beautiful and charismatic. She’d bounce back, probably higher than she is now.

“When’s my last day?” I ask.

“We’re keeping everyone on through the end of the year.”

“December 31?”

She pauses. “Yes.”

Happy goddamn New Year.

I become aware of my father sneaking looks at me.

Evelyn and I exchange businesslike pleasantries, and she thanks me for my years of service, but I’m not really listening as the conversation winds down and I hang up, still wondering why I didn’t make the cut.

Kate must be the rising star of the
Herald
, what there is left of it, anyway. She’s been using Twitter and has gathered quite a following of loyal readers who hang on her every post.

I never could figure out that damn Twitter, and it made me want to gnaw off my own hand every day when I read the comments posted beneath each of my stories on the newspaper’s Web site, from such insightful pundits as “Tigerrrfan32” and “Gdawg.” They picked apart the content of my stories, the syntax, even what I did at council meetings, reading hidden agendas into my every action: when I looked bored, when I was taking notes, whom I interviewed first after a meeting.

My dad begins to pull off the road.

“What are you doing?”

He nods toward the signs advertising places to eat. “Can’t see anything anyway. We might as well stop to eat and hope the snow lets up. Anyway, I want to talk to you, and I can’t do that very well while I’m driving.”

“We need to get to Dylan, and we’ve got sandwiches in the car.”

“I can’t see anything, Mike. We’ve got to stop. So we’ll eat.”

Minutes later we’re at a Wendy’s. My dad orders a baked potato and a salad and a glass of water.

I order the biggest, most cheese-drenched sandwich I see and a large fries. Plus a Diet Coke.

My dad raises his eyebrows at me, and I ignore him.

Dad leads the way and chooses a seat in the far reaches of the restaurant away from the counter, where the employees are joking around now that we’ve walked away. Except for a couple other storm refugees, we’re the only ones in here.

I drench my salty fries with more salt.

I have to acknowledge I might be doing this just to bug him.

Dad spreads his napkin carefully over his lap and picks at his plain potato. Not even butter.

“I’ve been meaning to talk to you anyway,” he says, squeezing his packet of fat-free Italian dressing.

“What about?” I ask, as if I don’t know, and take a giant bite of burger.

“So you’ll go to grad school.”

I chew the burger carefully, and decide not to reply. I’m just too tired.

“I’m not supporting you forever.”

I swallow hard. “You’re not supporting me now.”

“I could get much more in rent for that house than I do from you, and you haven’t purchased your own car in years. And I know you need the help, but the time has come to face facts, Mike.”

“Do tell.” I gaze out the window, but there’s nothing to see. Just bright dots piercing the white: headlights, taillights, gas station signs.

“Your career is a dead end. Journalism is dying, especially print journalism. You can’t make a living as a blogger; that’s a joke. What are you going to do, teach? I’m sure all the local colleges will be buried in ex-journalist résumés first thing Monday. It’s time you got a serious education.”

I swipe fries through a pool of salt on my paper placemat and dunk them in ketchup.

He goes on. “I will loan you the money for grad school provided you choose a field with some promise, something that can support three children and however many more you’ll have with your new girlfriend, in the proper fashion.”

“Ha. Proper fashion?”

“So you don’t have to ask me for money so that you can pay for the fancy jeans Angel wants to wear so she can fit in, for Dylan’s band trips. So you can save for their college educations and your own retirement. So you can own a real house.” Dad points at me with his plastic fork. “The way I raised you. The way your kids deserve to be raised.”

“I work hard.”

“Of course you do. But you also married an unstable woman who couldn’t hold down a job and kept having kids with her while she ran up debt.”

“Nice way to talk about your grandchildren.”

“I love my grandchildren. That’s why I’m doing this.”

“Threatening me?”

“Telling you that I’m charging you the market rate for rent in that house, and letting you buy your own car, and letting you figure out yourself how to pay for your own life. Unless you go to grad school for a decent job. In which case you’ll have all the help in the world.”

“Blackmail, now. With my children in the middle.”

“It’s your children I’m thinking of. I’m not going to subsidize your fantasy world any longer. I always said reporters don’t make enough money, and if you ever could, you certainly can’t now.”

“Unbelievable.”

“I’d think you’d jump at the chance.”

“So I just found out I got fired, and we’re going to fetch my runaway son, and this is when you decide to dump this on me?”

“Giving you time to think about it. You know, you could be an engineer. Your math grades were always excellent.”

“Fuck you.”

His mustache twitches. I think he might actually be smiling.

I throw down the burger. It slides apart, spilling condiments all over the tray. “Fine. Raise my rent. I’ll drop off the Honda this weekend. We’ll figure it out ourselves. I am done.”

If only I could storm off and slam a door.

Instead I reassemble my sandwich, and then discover I have no appetite for it anymore. In fact, I feel ill.

Dad is still eating his salad, so I’m forced to sit there, listening to the tinny speakers in Wendy’s play “White Christmas.”

A young couple comes in then, hanging on each other and laughing. The boy is thin and tall, with piercings. The girl’s cheeks are pink with cold, and her dark blond hair trails out from under a funny-looking knit hat. She’s got her arms wrapped around the boy underneath his unzipped jacket. They’re both white on one side of them with wind-whipped snow.

They gaze at each other as their giggles subside, then their faces meet and they plunge into a romantic kiss, the kind that happens in movies over a violin crescendo.

The fast food workers hoot their approval.

My dad snorts his disgust.

I stare down at my half-eaten meal and think about how much that girl looks like Casey, and wonder what she’s doing right this minute.

Chapter 27
Casey

I
t’s like we’re sister-wives!” giggles Mallory, as she chops up some vegetables.

I’m dropping spaghetti into a pot while the girls set the table, and try to laugh gamely because the girls are here.

I imagine having Michael to myself. The freedom and money to dash out for dinner just because we feel like it, having sex whenever we want, loudly if we want. Sleeping in until noon on Saturday, eating bagels in bed. Choosing a home together that would be ours, and always just ours. Starting fresh with our baby. Growing into a family gradually, and with care.

It’s impossible; Michael and his kids are a package deal. It’s like my daydreams as a kid where I could fly. My mom tells me I once thought I could grow into flying, like it was something grown-ups got like breasts or a beard. I was just little, but I do remember the crushing sensation of a collapsing dream when my mom told me, having to stifle her laughter when she realized I was in earnest, that I would never fly.