Blackjack and Moonlight: A Contemporary Romance (41 page)

Only she wasn’t moving on. She was weeping over the cleanliness of her linens, for God’s sake. She looked at the unadorned brown toast on her plate. She wasn’t eating well because Jack wasn’t there to remind her how good food could taste. It hurt to be alone in her bed—she didn’t fall asleep until her exhaustion outweighed her misery. Even then, images of Jack, snatches of his voice and the shadow of his touch, twisted her dreams until she had to wake up to stop the pain.

Elise was startled when the phone rang. For a heart-stopping moment, she thought it might be Jack, magically conjured up by how much she missed him.

It was her mother. Elise was tempted to let it go to voice mail but the “I was working” dodge seemed cruel after Peggy’s heart attack. “Hey, Mom.”

“Ellie? I hope I didn’t wake you.”

“I’ve been up for a while.”

Elise must have revealed something in her voice. “Are you okay, sweetheart? You sound tired.”

Elise tried to duck the question by asking her mother how she was doing. They talked about Peggy’s recovery, work, condo, and friends—all of which sounded just fine—before Elise felt she could decently bring the conversation to a close.

“Okay, Mom, you sound great. Look, I’ve got to—”

“Elise. I’m not getting off the phone to suit you. Tell me what’s upsetting you. Is it Jack?”

It was as though Peggy knew exactly which button to push. Elise struggled to get her emotions back behind a brisk façade. The sadness surged up, clogging her throat, making it impossible to speak.

“Ellie? You’re making me nervous. Tell me what’s going on.”

Elise tried but she simply couldn’t get any words out. Tears trickled down her cheeks. She reached for a tissue to blow her nose, not caring what it sounded like to her mother.

“Elise, stop this. You’re not six anymore. You will stop crying right now.” Peggy’s voice cut through the fog and startled Elise.

“What d’you mean, I’m not six years old anymore?” she mumbled.

There was a heavy silence. Then Peggy said, “You used to cry like that. Wordless and miserable. It just reminded me.”

Elise frowned. “What are you talking about, from when I was a kid?”

“I—” Peggy hesitated. Finally she admitted, “The divorce upset you.”

Elise felt her skin curdle. She must have the air-conditioning up too high. “You mean you and Daddy? What about the divorce?” She despised the fear in her voice, but she had to know. “Did you guys fight? Was I scared? Did I miss Daddy?”

Peggy didn’t say anything.

Elise searched for something, some idea of what it had been like. She clung to the most obvious explanation. “My parents were splitting up. Don’t all kids hate that?”

“I think it hit you harder.” Peggy’s voice hesitated. “You cried a lot.”

“I never cry.”

“El, you were nearly sobbing a minute ago.”

Elise scowled at the refrigerator, then she admitted Peggy was right. “It was just something upset me earlier.”

“What’s this about, sweetie? Tell me why you were crying,” Peggy insisted.

“It’s nothing.”

“Jack?”

No, she wasn’t going to explain about the pillowcase. She could tell it would set her off again. “He—” she paused. “We had a fight. He broke up with me.”

“That’s insane—that man loves you.”

Elise tried to get the conversation back to the point. “What about the divorce made me cry?”

“I don’t see how your dad’s and my divorce has anything to do with Jack’s feelings for you.” Peggy sounded mulish, almost adolescent.

Elise rubbed the side of her face. There was something just out of reach, some connection. Talking about it would make her cry again, but she wanted answers. “Mom, just tell me what happened, okay?”

“I don’t know what you want,” Peggy blurted out. “You want me to apologize? I’m sorry. I hurt you horribly, and your dad, and all because I wasn’t in love with him.”

“I don’t remember what it was like,” Elise said quietly. “If I cried then, I simply don’t remember.”

Finally Peggy spoke, her voice soft and resonating with her discomfort. “You cried a lot when I had to leave you with Pete.”

“Daddy? I don’t remember crying at his house.”

“He wasn’t in the Shaker Heights house. He hadn’t met your stepmother yet. It was the house I’d left. I never objected to his having you at holidays or in the summer, so you used to fly back to Ohio.”

Elise didn’t recall any airplane flights that far back. “When I was six?”

“I took you for the first couple of years. I’d drop you off at Pete’s—I mean, your dad’s house and fly back to Oregon.”

“I don’t remember any of this,” Elise said. She felt cold at the image of her as a kid, being dropped off at her dad’s house. Her mother didn’t make it sound like a happy reunion.

“You probably blocked it out.”

“Why?”

There was a long pause, and then a sigh. “The trips made you miserable, sweetheart. You would start to cry the moment I left and you wouldn’t stop. Pete couldn’t get you to calm down when I’d drop you off. He tried, but nothing worked. You’d stop eventually, I guess from exhaustion. Then the next day, as soon as you asked for me and he had to tell you I’d gone, you’d start up again.”

Elise walked over to the window on her tiny garden. It was another sizzling August day and the plants looked worn down by the summer heat.

“Why couldn’t you just stay with me?” she asked in a small voice.

“You mean, stay with you at Pete’s house?”

“Yes,” Elise burst out. “I was crying for you, wasn’t I? You dropped me off like a parcel and just left me. You could have stayed.” Her tears were back, silent ones that dripped onto her chest.

“El, get serious. I cheated on your father. If he didn’t hate me, he came damn close. I deserved it, of course. Plus, we’d vowed not to fight in front of you.”

“No fighting. Right.” Actually, that rang a bell in Elise’s mind. Both Peggy and Dad had been scrupulous about not putting each other down. “How long did my crying last?”

“For days. After that, you’d go all quiet and play by yourself.”

“No, I meant, how old was I when I grew out of that? It sounds so childish.”

“I’m not sure.” Peggy sounded worn down by the topic. “I think you got better at hiding it as you got older. So, I don’t know. Maybe eleven or twelve? Of course, by that point you’d gotten surly with all of us. Classic adolescent behavior.”

Elise remembered
those
years. “That’s why you sent me to stay with Dad for high school. Because I was a brat.”

“Jeez, you really have this backward,” Peggy exclaimed. “No, it wasn’t because you were a brat. Pete and I discussed it and we agreed that you needed more stability and attention than I was giving you in Oregon. I was in school plus working, he’d remarried so your stepmother was available during the day with the boys. It made sense.”

When they’d talked with her about that move, Elise remembered saying “Whatever” to anything anyone suggested to her. She’d been a brat.

She frowned. “Did you ever talk to someone about those crying jags from when I was younger? Did you ever get help for me, or even for yourself?”

“No. I couldn’t afford it, and Pete—well, he doesn’t think psychologists know what they’re talking about.” Peggy’s voice softened. “We just waited for you to grow out of it. And you seemed to do that.”

“Oh.” Elise could feel something solid in the fog, a handle that she just needed to grab onto. “Okay. Yeah, okay. Thanks, Mom. I need to figure this out, okay?”

“El—?”

“Yeah?”

“Did Jack propose?”

There was that gleam of metal again, the sense that she could find her way if she could just hold on to the one real thing in her world.

“Kind of,” Elise answered.

“I hope it works out, sweetheart.”

“Me too.”

Elise struggled to get back to some version—one without any pillowcases—of her Sunday routine. She went down to her office, looked longingly at her computer, but she hadn’t been able to find any work to bring home, just a couple of back issues of
The Practical Litigator
…and she’d read them on Saturday. Finally she gave up and called Christine.

“Hey, stranger, I haven’t heard from you for a long time.”

Elise cleared her throat. “I know. I’ve been unhappy,” she said baldly. She picked up Jack’s moonlight paperweight, turning it over in her hand.

“No shit. Tell me something I don’t already know.”

“I started crying at a pillowcase.”

“Wait, you mean into a pillowcase, right?”

“No. At it. Because it smells of my laundry detergent. And not of Jack.”

There was a pause. “Oh.” Christine’s tone conveyed equal amounts of horror and sympathy.

“Yeah,” Elise said. The light played off the wave, frozen in the act of breaking.

“Hey, how come you keep ducking my calls? And where’s Kim? My calls just go to your voice mail. At least let me cheer you up. I know, it’s not too late—let’s go to brunch. Bloody Marys can cure almost anything.”

“They fired Kim.”

Christine sighed. “Oh, shit. I was afraid of that.”

“You knew that was going to happen?” Elise demanded.

“Not exactly. I knew there was talk of cost-cutting.”

“Well, I’m suing them if they don’t rehire her.”

“We’re in an employment-at-will state. They can fire anyone they want.”

“I’m basing it on federal law, that she was entitled to unpaid leave under the Family and Medical Leave Act.”

“Did she request unpaid leave?”

“As a matter of fact, she did, back when Donny first got injured. It was in an email she sent to HR, explaining that she might need some time as he’d be out of work for a while and she’d be needed at home. They never answered her.”

Christine whistled. “They were on notice.”

“Precisely. I’ve drafted a brief, which I forwarded to Geoff as a courtesy. It’s even money they’ll rehire Kim and fire me.”

“And what does that have to do with pillowcases?”

Trust Christine to get back to the point.

“Nothing. Everything. Oh, I don’t know. I’m just really sad,” Elise admitted.

Christine huffed. “What’s really going on, sweetie?”

“I talked with my mother this morning.”

“She’s okay, isn’t she?”

“Yeah, she’s great. We—she asked about Jack and I started crying, and she yelled at me.”

“What for? Breaking up with Jack?”

Elise frowned. She put the paperweight down and poked at the paperclips in a bowl on her desk. “No. She yelled at me for crying. She told me I wasn’t six anymore.”

“I’m confused. What’s being six got to do with pillowcases not smelling like your hunky judge?”

Elise could feel it again, that metallic glint of a doorknob, or window latch or something, a handle leading out of the mystery. “I was really sad as a kid, being shuttled back and forth between Mom in Eugene and Dad in Ohio. Then, suddenly, I wasn’t sad, just grumpy and sullen.”

“I know what that looks like,” Christine muttered.

“But that’s the part I don’t get. Why am I crying?”

“Uh, because Jack McIntyre broke up with you—? Does that tiny detail ring a bell?”

Elise glared at the paperweight, beautiful and frozen. That wave would never break. “Yeah, I get that part. That’s not what I mean. What I’m asking is—I predicted his departure from the very beginning. It was my master plan, for God’s sake. So why am I unhappy it succeeded?”

There was a pause, then Christine sounded like she was working through the puzzle. “I see—you want to know why, if you always knew your time with him was temporary, you’re now so miserable that he’s left?”

“Exactly.”

“Other than the fact that he was an amazing lover, devoted boyfriend, and damned good bet for the future, I really couldn’t say.” Christine’s voice was soft with empathy. She sounded like Peggy. Both of them made Elise feel like she was too freaking stupid to get the point.

“You and my mother. What the fuck are you people not telling me?” Elise yelled.

“Whoa. Calm down. What did I do?”

“I admit it, okay? I admit I fell in love with him. He broke up with me. He’s the one who left. Why am I the bad guy?” Elise stormed.

“Elise. No one is saying you’re the bad guy. We’re just pointing out that Jack’s not the bad guy either. He didn’t break up with you, he left because you didn’t give him a choice.”

There it was again. A silvery doorknob. If Elise could just grab it and pull…

Suddenly she was remembering Bart Mather before the
Everton
hearing, insisting that she’d broken up with him. Only she hadn’t. They’d just stopped dating. No one broke up with anyone, no one left—

“Chris? I gotta go. I’ll call you later, or stop by your office, or we’ll have lunch, I promise.”

“Okay, but what’s goin—”

Elise hung up before she heard the rest of that question, but she knew the answer. She was about to pull on the handle.

Several cups of coffee later, Elise felt hyper. And calmer than she had in a long time.

She still didn’t remember those childhood flights to and from Ohio, but just picturing her flight to Oregon on Father’s Day—seeing the departures hall at Philadelphia Airport in her mind—was enough to trigger more tears. It was the same feeling she’d had with the pillowcase—that she was alone and nothing would be right again.