Young Wives (25 page)

Sometimes the cast was a little flat, a little boring, but every now and then she’d hit someone like Mrs. Louise D’Orio, a woman who believed that lip lines had nothing to do with lipstick application and that hats were always appropriate. Mrs. D’Orio—“Call me Lou-Lou. All my friends do”—would go through a space commenting on
everything
, from the window treatments to the shelf paper. Mrs. D’Orio also explained how everything should be, where Angie should put cup hooks for her mugs and which outlet would be the best one to plug the coffeemaker into.

But Michael’s suggestion was the best. Esther Anderson was terrific. Angie knew that she was too chatty and would bug the shit out of her mother, but underneath the compulsive talking and judgments, Angie liked the woman’s basic honesty. “You could do better than this, dear,” she would say. Or, “This one’s definitely not for you. It wouldn’t have worked for Mr. Rice, either.” Or, “This would work if only it had more closet space. You have to be able to put your stuff someplace and don’t start with those armoires. I tell you, they don’t work.”

It was in the apartment without enough closet space that Angie became suddenly dizzy and then very, very nauseated. What was it with her? Her emotional instability had gone to her stomach. She gestured to Mrs. Anderson and then rushed to the bathroom, where her retching noise had to be clearly audible. She flushed the toilet a few times, washed her mouth at the sink, and then had to wipe it on her sleeve since there wasn’t even a sheet of toilet paper left in the abandoned bathroom.

Angie tried to think about why she felt so sick. She had really been taking the apartment hunting gently; her father didn’t want her to move out and her mother was willing to help in any way she could. But it still felt scary and lonely. Was she so frightened to live alone that it made her puke? She shook her head, patted a little water on her face, and wiped it with her other sleeve. She didn’t feel flu-ish and she had no other symptoms. But maybe she should go to a doctor.

When she came out and joined Mrs. Anderson, the woman was looking through a kitchen cabinet below a bookshelf. “You couldn’t put wine here,” she said. “Heat rises from the steam pipes. You’d have vinegar in a month.” She stood up and turned to Angie. “Was it something you ate, dear?” she asked.

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe it’s nerves,” Mrs. Anderson told her. She put her hand on Angie’s shoulder. “At least you know it’s not morning sickness. It’s not morning.”

In the car driving back to her father’s, Angie felt sick again, but not sick enough to throw up. What she felt was sick about the possibility that she might be pregnant. She tried to work backward, tried to figure out the last time she and Reid had made love. It was painful to think about, but she remembered the night before their anniversary, or was it the night before
that
? As she drove through the darkness she tried to count forward on her fingers, and tried to remember the last time she’d gotten her period. She hadn’t come to her dad’s with anything, not even a toothbrush, much less a tampon, and he certainly didn’t have any at his house.
So
, Angie thought with anxiety tightening her neck and chest and even her throat,
since I haven’t bought or borrowed any Tampax, I haven’t had my period since
…She tried to count backward, but simply couldn’t.

Of course, she told herself, she was nervous and upset. Of course she was. She knew that. That could make her skip. She also told herself she should stop at the next CVS or Rexall and pick up a home pregnancy test. But she kept driving.

Because if she was pregnant, what in the world would she do?

Consisting of milk, cookies, and vomit

Michelle stopped on her way back from dropping Jada at her car in the bank parking lot and did a quick grocery run—just for some skim milk, dog treats for Pookie, a head of lettuce, and a few vegetables because Frank liked them fresh. Everything looked picked over and tired. She put some produce in a bag, then stopped at a pyramid of apples, choosing one near the top. She knew they were waxed, and hated for Jenna to eat them, but her daughter loved apples. As Michelle was about to add another to the bag, she noticed that the skin which looked so red, so perfect, collapsed under the pressure of her fingers like a puffball mushroom collapsing. She realized she hadn’t had time either to bake or stop at the bakery, so she threw a bag of Oreos onto the checkout counter as a guilty afterthought. She should at least have gotten Fig Newtons, but she weakened because the kids loved these.

She drove a little faster than she should have on the way home, but that was justified because it allowed her to pull into the driveway before the kids were dropped off by the bus. She’d just gotten placemats out and put some Oreos on Frankie Junior’s favorite plate—the one with pictures of Peter Rabbit that he’d had since he was a baby—when the children walked in the door. Pookie went nuts, wagging not only his tail but his entire butt and doing a little dance of welcome. All of a sudden Michelle was so glad to see them that she felt like doing a dance. Instead she hugged Jenna a little more tightly than she meant to.

“
Mo-o-m!
” Jenna said, dragging out the syllable in the new pre-teen voice of annoyance she’d recently developed. She pushed Michelle away, but she did it with good humor. “I got a B on my spelling test,” she added to show there were no hard feelings.

Michelle stopped the automatic question (“Why not an A?”) that her own mother would have asked and instead gave her daughter a big smile. “That’s great,” she said while she helped Frankie take his turtleneck off. “I know you studied hard for it. Good girl. Daddy will be proud.”

Jenna nodded. “If I hadn’t messed up ‘neighbor,’ I would have gotten an A-.
Shouldn’t
neighbor be spelled N-A-B-O-R-E?” she asked, aggrieved.

“If the world was fair, but it isn’t,” Michelle said, then straightened Frankie’s dark, dark hair. “How was school for
you
, sweetie?” she asked her son.

“My snack was good,” Frankie shrugged, then made straight for the kitchen table and climbed into his chair. That was positive for now. Obviously, things had calmed down and his pants had been dry. “Oreos! Two snacks! This
is
a good day,” he said, already reaching for the cookies.

Michelle had to smile and felt such gratitude that it made the troubles she and Frank had gone through, at least for the moment, seem small. She had her children, she had her marriage, and whatever it took, they would get through their legal problems. For a moment she thought of Jada, probably alone now in her kitchen, and then she couldn’t help but push the dark thought away. She’d think about it later, call her later, maybe invite her over.

“Can I have juice instead of milk?” Jenna asked as she took her seat at the table.

Michelle shook her head. “Juice
after
homework, if you want it. Right now you need the calcium.” She poured out the glass of milk, as well as a cup for Frankie. Then, remembering herself for the first time in about a week, she found her packet of vitamins, took three Rolaids, and began to swallow them all down with the skim milk.

“You know what happened that was terrible?” Jenna asked, and Michelle nearly choked on the last mouthful. Had there been another emotional atrocity on the school bus or in the classroom? Things seemed to have really calmed down for the kids. Thank God, people forgot things quickly: there was always a new scandal in the paper, and Frank, as he predicted, hadn’t been charged with anything. But that important legal distinction didn’t prevent cruelty to her kids. “What?” she asked her daughter. What fresh hell was this?

“Mrs. Blackwell gave us so much math homework and almost all of it is word problems for the weekend.” Jenna looked up at her mother. “Do you hate word problems?”

“I really do,” Michelle said with more enthusiasm than usual. She kept the smile of relief to herself. “But your daddy is good at them,” she reminded her daughter.

Jenna nodded, then dawdled over the cookies as she always did, separating them and licking off the cream before she ate them. Frankie grabbed and crunched down more than his share until Michelle stopped him.

“Can I play with Kevon today?” he asked.

Michelle shook her head. She couldn’t explain about Kevon’s disappearance now. She thought again of Jada, all alone, and put the thought away. “Uh-uh,” she told her son, “but you can watch whatever video you want, and then play with Daddy. He’s home early.”

At least he should be. His truck had been parked outside. Where was Frank, she wondered? Usually you couldn’t be in the house with him without knowing his whereabouts—whether you wanted to or not. He was always playing music or nailing something together or watching a ball game at top volume or yelling on the phone.

She turned to her daughter. “Jenna, stop playing with those cookies and eat them. I want to see you at that table with your math in front of you when I get back down here.” Then she took Frankie by the hand and led him into the family room. Macy’s had already delivered the new couch, and with the books back on the shelves along with the two lamps she’d picked up at the lighting store near the bank, the room actually looked good again. She made a mental note to stop tomorrow at Pier I and get some throw pillows in cheerful colors—maybe blue and yellow, she thought—because the kids loved to lounge on them and all the old ones had been destroyed. So had Pookie’s wicker dog bed. She’d get one of those, too. She hoped Bruzeman got back every cent and more for them when they sued.

“Okay,” she explained to Frankie, “you get to be the first to sit on the nice new couch and you can watch one video—whatever you want—before dinner.” Frankie grinned up at her, made his selection, and she popped in
Fern Gully
. Then she went down the hall to search for Frank, Pookie padding along behind her.

He wasn’t in the shop he’d built himself at the back of the two-car garage. Then, when she first put her head into his office, she thought that he wasn’t in there because the room was dark and quiet. But as she was about to turn away and close the door, she heard a rustle and jumped. She turned back. This room had also been savaged by the cops, and they hadn’t really fixed it yet except to right the furniture and clean up the broken bits and torn papers.

Pookie made his welcome noise as he approached a darker part of the darkness. Now, in the light she let in from the hall, Michelle could see the dog was greeting Frank, who was sitting in the dark at his desk, absolutely still in the torn and battered office chair—the one thing the cops hadn’t ripped up any worse than it had been torn before. Frank had always liked it just as it was. He’d taken it from his old bedroom at his mother’s house and carted it to their first apartment, then to the duplex they’d lived in, and finally to their own home.

Seeing him there, sitting in it in the darkness, one hand clutching the worn plastic arms, the other absently stroking the dog, filled Michelle with a sick feeling. He’d been so strong through all of this. Was he finally feeling the terrible strain? Despite her obvious presence in the doorway, he didn’t even turn to acknowledge her. As she adjusted to the dimness, Michelle could see that her husband’s eyes were open, so he wasn’t sleeping.

“Frank?” she whispered, not because she was afraid the children could hear her—the office was down a long hall behind the dining room, close to the garage entrance—but because she was afraid to speak any louder to him. He seemed in some kind of daze, some faraway state. “Frank?” she whispered again.

Very, very slowly he swiveled the chair away and then toward her again. But his eyes didn’t follow the movement. For a crazy moment she thought of the Jesus picture that used to hang in her mother’s living room, wherever they lived at the time. The eyes followed her wherever she went, making sure, as her mother warned her, that she dusted even under the furniture and behind the books. But this was the opposite. Frank’s body and face were directly in front of her, but his eyes had stayed focused somewhere beyond the window, though the shade was closed.

Michelle was frightened, and as usual, her fear froze her. She was afraid to either close the door and be alone in the darkness with Frank or turn on the light and reveal anything more to herself. But even across the room she could feel her husband’s pain, as palpable as the new couch their son was sitting on upstairs.

“What is it, Frank?” she forced herself to ask. “Are you okay?” She thought of Jenna and Frankie, looking forward to their evening with Daddy. It didn’t look as if he was up to it. Exhausted as she was from her afternoon with Jada, she would comfort him if he had to, finally, break down over this. And she’d cover with the kids.

“What is it Frank?” she repeated, her voice gentle.

“An indictment’s going to be handed down,” Frank said, his own voice low and dead. Michelle wasn’t sure for a moment what he meant.

“They’ve indicted the police?” she asked.

“Not the police! They’ve indicted
me
,” Frank said fiercely, as if she were an idiot. “They’ve indicted me, Michelle.”

She couldn’t help it—she took a step or two backward until she was leaning against the bookshelves. “But for what?” she asked. “And how could they indict you? I mean…” Her brain was spinning.

“I don’t know. There was some kind of secret grand jury. Believe it or not, it’s legal, Bruzeman says there was probably some kind of investigation going on for months. The prosecutor must have convinced the judge that they had substantial proof and a need for confidentiality. It’s been convened this whole last week.”

“But didn’t
anybody
, didn’t Bruzeman know? Our assemblymen? Your county friends? Anyone? I mean—”

“If they knew, they didn’t say,” Frank admitted, his voice harsh with anger. “What were all those lunches, those campaign contributions for? Bruzeman—” Frank tried to calm himself and ran his hand through his thick hair. “I have to trust him. He’s the best in Westchester. As long as I can pay him, he’s trustworthy. But I…” He stopped again and this time Michelle heard the panic in his voice. Which panicked her.