“No, I wouldn’t say that. She complains about Grant. She whines about Grant. She snivels, gripes, moans and groans, but no, I can’t say she has ever talked to me about Grant.”
A chuckle escaped Charlene. Jake also had a way with the unvarnished truth.
“There are times, Charlie, when I think I almost like the boyfriend better than my own daughter.”
She shrugged and chuckled again. Guiltily. “She’s been a little high-maintenance lately,” Charlene commiserated.
“Y’know, I forbade her to move in with him. I absolutely forbade her,” he went on. “She totally blew me off, called me old-fashioned, overprotective, the whole bit. Told me she knew what she was doing. And now what? All she does is bitch. Things just aren’t going too well for the little couple. I guess Mr. Grant isn’t courting her enough, huh?”
“Well, what do you say to her when she lays all the whining on you?” Charlene seriously wanted to know.
“I tell her to grow the fuck up.”
God, he was a clod. “Oh, that’s sensitive. You don’t really say that, do you?”
“No, I think that, but I don’t say it. If I said it she would cry. And you know what happens to me when she cries. It takes the bones out of my legs and I crumble. But I’d like to say it. I gotta tell you…I’ve been thinking it a lot lately.”
“I’ve even thought that about you,” Charlene taunted.
“You look good, Charlie,” he said. “You put on a little weight?”
She ground her teeth. She wanted to kill him for that. “About Stephanie—”
“You’re right, I shouldn’t be too hard on the kid. She going to learn about successful relationships with us as role models?”
She let out a huff of indignant laughter. “You weren’t so hot, maybe. I think I was a fine role model.”
“Hey, hey, hey, I didn’t mean to say you were a bad parent. Jesus, Charlie, you were the best parent in the world. There is no better mother than you. Hell, I wish you were my mother! I just mean about relationships. We weren’t, either one of us, able to make one stick.”
“Yeah, well, I only tried once, remember. You tried, what? Five times?” She shivered. She was cold, miserable, wet and a quarter mile from a warm fire, a glass of wine and stable, consistent Dennis. For some reason it didn’t occur to her to ask Jake to just drive her home.
“Four. I don’t think you can say five since I married the same woman twice. You remember Godzilla? What a disaster that was. But I was married to Stella for seven years, you know. That would almost be considered a success.”
“I still can’t imagine why you left Stella. You must be crazy.”
“Me, crazy? Gimme a break. It’s Stella who doesn’t have too many arrows in the old quiver, if you get my drift.”
“Stella? She’s mother earth!”
“Yeah, she’s a good kid at heart. It’s just all the yoga, natural food, crystals, wood-nymph music, beads, bangles and fucking affirmations. People can be too positive, you know. It’s wearing. But never mind, she was always great with Stephie.”
“Maybe Stephanie can move in with Stella,” Charlene said.
“What’s’ a matter, Mom?” he said, jostling her with an elbow. “The little chick threatening to move home?”
“She suggested she might….”
“And if I know you, you talked to her about her commitment to Grant because there’s no way you want Stephie, who is an even bigger slob than me, back in your tidy little nest.” He slapped his knee and giggled. His laugh was contagious but his giggle was positively repellent.
“No,” she lied. “I told her she should consider moving in with you.”
“Yeah, sure,” he said. “Y’know, I admit I regret the way I played it.”
“Played what?” she wanted to know.
“I wish I’d done what you did. Stayed out of the game altogether. Refused to hook up at all, with anyone. Just flat-ass refused to get together with anyone who wasn’t absolutely perfect. Period.”
“That isn’t what I did! There wasn’t anyone…starting with you!”
“We don’t have to sing the ‘Jake was a lousy husband’ song again. We’re all getting a little tired of that one. I was young, you were young, we were stupid.”
“You were stupid,” she said.
“Yeah, yeah. So what we have here is me, getting married all the time and never able to make it stick, and you, with an obvious fear of marriage—”
“I’m not afraid of marriage!”
“Oh, really?” he asked, eyebrows arched sharply.
“Not at all!”
“Afraid of commitment, then?”
“Don’t be ridiculous! Dennis and I are totally committed.”
“Just afraid to take the next step and make it legal? I mean, I can understand, it’s only been, what, five years or so….”
“For your information, we’re planning to get married, we just haven’t—”
She stopped suddenly. She had no idea she was going to say that. Or what she was going to say next.
“Just haven’t what, Charlie? Picked the century yet?”
She stared at him blankly for a moment. Her life flashed before her eyes. Well, maybe not her life, but certainly her day, and the way it had seemed to happen to her through a series of random disasters. April Fools’? Maybe she was the only fool.
“And that’s why Stephie is all fucked up about marriage,” he said. “Because between the two of us we can’t come up with one decent relationship. Know what I mean, Charlie? Admit it, you’re as reluctant as I am impetuous. Huh?”
“You know what?” she said to him. “I had to coparent with you, but the baby has grown up. She’s an adult, whether she likes it or not, and while she might need her parents, she has had plenty of time to adjust to the divorce. And I’ll be damned if I’m going to talk about this whole thing with you for another quarter century! Leave me alone for a while, will you?”
She opened the door and got out of his car, the blanket still wrapped around her shoulders and dragging through muddy puddles behind her. His ability to insult and enrage her had not lessened in twenty-five years. She went to her car and retrieved her purse and briefcase, locked the door and started walking. Stomping.
“Charlie, what the hell are you doing?” he called out of his opened window. She stomped on, muttering incoherently to herself. He could still, with such ease, provoke her into irrational behavior. Here she was, walking down the soft, muddy shoulder of an isolated two-lane road in the dark, in the rain. It was worse than irrational, it was suicidal. But right that moment it made more sense than sitting in the car with him.
“Charlie, this is stupid!” he yelled.
God, he was following her. In the car.
A car going in the opposite direction whizzed by. The splash off the tires provided a fine spray of mud to add to the rain, which had lessened to a heavy drizzle, but was not quite enough to wash the streaks of mud off her face and coat.
All the stuff she thought she had handled began to come back one at a time. The Samuelsons, Stephanie, Dennis and Dr. Malone, Peaches—and Jake, his timing as bad as ever.
“Charlie!” he yelled. “Hold up, will you? I need to ask you something. I need a favor.”
“In your dreams,” she muttered to herself. If I am afraid of commitment, she thought, Jake Dugan would be a good enough reason.
A flashing red light throbbed over her head and she turned to see that her ex-husband had attached his portable police beacon to the top of his car. He followed her at a safe distance, slowly, so that if a car approached from behind, she wouldn’t be mowed down. But then again, she wouldn’t need this service if he hadn’t shown up in the first place, which was the cause of her walking home in the mud and rain when she had a perfectly good cell phone in her purse.
She made the right turn into her neighborhood in ten minutes. She could have been faster if the weather had been decent. The flashing red light disappeared and Jake’s headlight
s strafed the houses as he made a U-turn and departed. It was then that she realized she wore his blanket around her shoulders. She shrugged it off on the front walk and hung it over the wrought-iron entry gate.
She stepped into her house and stepped into sanity. The lights were dimmed, the table set, candles lit, fire in the hearth and two cups of something steaming sat on the coffee table in front of the fireplace. Dennis, having heard her come in, appeared in the kitchen doorway, wiping his hands on a dish towel. The sight of all this peaceful domesticity warmed the heart of the drowned rat and without stopping to consider the ramifications Charlene heard herself say, “Dennis, do you still want to get married?”
Stephanie moved a cherry around in her Coke with the straw, staring into the mix, daydreaming. She sat at the far end of the bar near the cash register, and when Grant was between customers, he spent a few minutes leaning across the bar talking to her.
This was how they’d met. She’d been at the bar with a couple of girlfriends and had flirted with the cute bartender. That was two and a half, almost three years ago. It was a lot more romantic then than it was now.
A guy, carrying his drink, sauntered over and sat down beside her. “Tell me you’re not waiting for someone,” he said to her.
“Okay. I’m not waiting for someone.”
He smiled. He wasn’t bad-looking, with a nice shape to his face, curly hair and friendly brown eyes. A sharp dresser. He rolled his eyes heavenward. “Thank you, God.” He refocused on her face. “So, tell me your heart’s desire and I’ll bring it to your feet.”
I must be getting old, Stephanie thought. Bar talk used to be fun…and now it only sounds stupid.
“Hey, Freddy,” Grant said, slapping a cocktail napkin down in front of him. “You meet my girl?”
“Your girl? Shit.”
“Freddy, meet Stephanie. Stephanie, meet Fast Freddy.”
“Fred,” he corrected with a casual sneer directed at Grant. “Darlin’, if you’re mixed up with this guy, you’re making a huge mistake. Let me take care of you.”
“What can I get for you, Freddy?” Grant asked. Grant had that look—narrowed eyes, forced smile, sunken cheeks. He was working on being polite. This was not a good sign for Stephanie. If Grant had appeared to actually like Fred, Stephanie might have shunned the man. But Grant’s dislike provoked her into overt friendliness. It was all about the way things had been going lately. The squabbling. The complete failure of compromise. The need to do something to perk things up, to get Grant’s attention.
“I’m good,” Fred said, lifting his half-full glass. “Fix up the lady, here. My treat.”
“You think she buys drinks at my bar?” Grant asked with a mean laugh.
“You mean she’s really your girl?” he asked, incredulous.
“Really. As in, we live together. Another Diet Coke, Steph?”
“No, thanks. So,” she said, turning her full attention and sweetest smile on Freddy. “How long have you two known each other?”
“From the Stone Age, man.” He sipped. “Like, high school.”
“Jeez, I thought I’d met all Grant’s high-school pals,” she said.
“That should tell you something,” Grant said, turning away to serve other patrons.
“He’s always been the jealous type. I get all the girls. But until this moment it meant nothing.”
She laughed at his absurdity. “These come-ons, Freddy. Stale. Old. Completely transparent.”
“I know. I’m thinking of getting a writer.”
“Ah, the Cyrano de Bergerac syndrome.”
“Spoken like a movie buff….”
“English teacher.”
“No kidding?” He seemed to relax into himself. “I’m a history major. I taught for two years. I really liked the kids, but the pay sucked.”
“So I’ve noticed.” She glanced at Grant and saw him glowering. Her eyes went back to Fred. “What do you do now?”
“I’m a day trader. Stocks. Commodities.”
Her eyes actually lit up at the word day, but Freddy might have thought she was responding to trader. “Really? Sounds interesting. Tell me all about it.”
On the night Charlene and Dennis decided to get married, they changed a flat tire in the rain, traded their wet clothes for warm terry robes and then spent a quiet evening talking about the day’s events over a light dinner of hot soup and cold salad. “You go first,” she said to him. He, somewhat reluctantly, told her about an auto accident that had taken two lives—a grandfather who might’ve had a coronary at the wheel and a nine-year-old boy who wasn’t buckled in and upon whom the emergency team had exercised every gift modern medicine had to offer before they let him go. It was Dr. Malone’s first fatality as a pediatric resident.
“Now you,” he said, and she skipped the Samuelsons and Stephanie’s remarks and went straight to her mother’s crisis. Tears threatened again. Charlene honestly didn’t know if she was going to get through this without endless crying.
When she was finished, Dennis said, “You know, it could be a number of things—from the predictable old-age dementia to Alzheimer’s. It could even be small strokes…or maybe she was just very tired or had other worries on her mind. Then again, maybe it only appeared she was confused and lost when she was daydreaming.”
“Do you think it’s possible?” she asked hopefully.
“I think she’d better see a doctor, a specialist. There’s a good geriatrics doctor at St. Rose’s. People like him. If you can get Lois to go, I can get her a quick appointment. He owes me.”
Dennis always made everything all right. No matter what the crisis, he could be counted on. “I would be so lost without you,” she said.
“So that was what had you crying? Worrying about your mother?”
“Yes. Silly, isn’t it? I usually check things out before I overreact.”
“And were you so overwrought that you walked home from your car in the rain?”
She grimaced. Ah yes, there was something else she hadn’t mentioned. “Jake was on his way here to ask me a favor,” she said. “He pulled up right behind me, moments after the tire went flat. It started to pour so I got in his car to sit it out. Then he asked me if I’d put on a little weight.”
Dennis couldn’t help himself. He started to laugh.
“I wasn’t amused,” she said.
“I don’t imagine you were.” He had no trouble envisioning her as she jumped out of his car and, furious, walked the rest of the way in the rain. “Just tell me one thing. You didn’t suggest we get married because Jake made you feel fat, did you?”
“No,” she said. “But by the time I got here, soaked and mad, I realized that the one thing in my life that I have always been able to count on is you. And I’m stupid not to tie you down and get you off the market.”
“Charlene, I’ve been off the market for five years.”
“And I’ve been crazy to let you run around loose. Dennis? Do you think it’s a bad idea? Because—”
He covered her hand with his. “I think it’s probably about time.”
She sighed in relief. For some reason, all she wanted was to have this one part of her life settled. Mapped out, covered, secured. Done.
“Why don’t you take a soak while I clean the dishes,” he said. “Then I’ll start the bedroom fireplace and meet you in there.”
She had a moment’s hesitation. “Dennis—”
“It’s all right, Charlene,” he said, reading her mind. “We’ve both had rough days. I’m thinking along the lines of a little CNN before sleeping.”
By the time she got out of the bath, he had already nodded off on top of the comforter. At 5:00 a.m. she felt his lips touch her forehead as he prepared to leave for his early start in the emergency room. She could smell the coffee he’d made, and although he was clean shaven, there would be no evidence that he’d used the bathroom sink; Dennis was as immaculate as she. She couldn’t have asked for a better night’s sleep, all her worries and anxietie
s put to rest by the best companion of her life.
Yes, it was probably about time.
Three
When Charlene entered her office, Pam London was taken aback. “Wow,” she said, her mouth dropping open in surprise. “Look at you.”
“What?” Charlene asked, but she smiled because she knew what Pam saw. She’d seen it herself in the mirror that very morning.
“You look ravishing. You haven’t looked this good since you got back from Mazatlan.”
“Ravishing?”
“My, my, yes.” Pam squinted a bit, studying Charlene’s face. “What is it? New makeup?”
“Not exactly. Come into my office, will you?” Pam followed, notepad in hand, and shut the door behind her. “Dennis and I have decided to get married,” Charlene said, skipping any preamble.
Pam didn’t make it very far into the spacious office before she sank into a deep and comfy leather chair. Speechless.
“This can’t possibly be a surprise,” Charlene said.
“Can’t it be…?”
Charlene, businesslike, began taking papers out of her briefcase and placing them in separate stacks on the desktop. “To the contrary. Some would even say this is way overdue, that we should have done it years ago. After five years, it seems almost like a mere formality.” Indeed, on the very night they had made the decision, nothing special set it apart from any other night they spent together. Except maybe the changing of a tire in the rain, which Dennis accomplished while Charlene held the flashlight.
“I guess I thought—” Pam didn’t finish.
“You thought we didn’t need marriage?”
“Well…that’s what you always said.”
“And it’s still true. We don’t need marriage, but wanting it is a different story. To make our commitment complete.”
“That’s lovely.”
“You are the absolute first to know. I haven’t even told Stephanie yet, or my mother. Lois thinks I’m completely hopeless, so she’s going to flip, and Stephanie…Well, I haven’t talked to her since yesterday.” And in thinking about that conversation some of the glow threatened to fade from Charlene’s features. She would have to call Stephanie and tell her about her grandmother; they were very close. But as for the marriage plans, she could wait. In fact, Charlene was still smarting a little from Stephanie’s words and didn’t look forward to calling her at all. “But I wanted to tell you immediately,” Charlene said to Pam. “Because I’d like you to stand up for me, if you will.”