Carpool Confidential (33 page)

“She works really long hours,” I said.

“And the lunch date could be another woman. Or it could even be a man. Jen's awfully feminine for a lesbian, don't you think? You don't think she plays for both teams, do you?”

“Want me to ask her?” I said. “She's sitting right here.”

“Never mind,” Betsy said. “Gotta run, but I'll be in touch later.”

“You're up as the mystery blogger,” I told Jen.

“Speaking of which?…” she raised a questioning brow. “What's going to happen now?”

“No idea,” I confessed. “You know I feel almost like it's taken up the portion of my life that used to be devoted to being a wife. I update like three and four times a day, I store up little thoughts and ideas, think about how things will play out. It's part of the fabric of my days now. So does it just end? Have I run out of material if he's back? Am I going to be a contented wife again with nothing to blog about? Am I obligated to tell him what I'm doing? It's all just more stuff I don't know the answers to.”

“Do you want to still be married to him?” Trust Randy to get to the heart of it.

“The kids are beside themselves they're so thrilled he's back.”

“That's not what I asked.”

“I know that. I don't know what I want. We were married for a long time. I loved him. And despite the fact that he's done everything in his power to extinguish that, I guess there's still a spark of it somewhere, or at least the belief it's still there. And”—I looked at them, they both had kids, they could understand—“if there's any chance of it working out, it's hard to rationalize walking away when there are two children involved.”

They both nodded. “I know,” Randy said. “And I'm worried he does too.”

“That was a good list of reasons to try,” Jen said, “but it didn't cover what you want.”

“I'd have to be a moron to want a man who comes back after an unexplained absence of several months and leaves a trail of laundry, whiskers, and skid marks before sneaking out for parts unknown while I'm bringing his kids to school.”

“So?” Randy smiled. “Are you a moron?”

“Maybe,” I admitted. “I wish I knew why he was back. It's pretty clear from his behavior that he's not dying to answer that question. I'm also not getting a he-loves-me-and-missed-me-and-is-recommited-and-we'll-all-live-blissfully-ever-after vibe.”

“You
can
insist, you know,” Randy said.

I nodded. “I know. But I'm not ready yet. And as long as he's here and I'm not aggressively driving him away, I have a better chance of figuring out what's happening and if there's any money left.”

“Definitely something to that,” Randy agreed. “Be accommodating and unaggressive but don't call off the PI or the lawyer.” She raised a brow. “Can you do that?”

“It seems kind of underhanded,” I said.

“I meant can you do it without killing him. I couldn't.”

“And the orgy?” Jen asked.

I put my head in my hands for something like the fifteenth time since this little sit-down had convened.

Randy brightened. “Now that's a question. Are you bringing Rick?”

“I already have a date.”

“You do?”

“The story is in today's first blog. Luke knows someone who just moved to New York two weeks ago, knows no one here, and—here's the kicker—owes Luke money. I was reduced to having my younger brother extort his friend to take me to an orgy. Is it any wonder I'm considering giving the marriage another chance?”

“Just don't sleep with anyone,” Randy warned.

“Are my morals at issue?” I asked.

“You just need to be really careful. New York is a no-fault state, but equitable distribution doesn't necessarily mean half and half. Adultery, misuse of marital assets, abandonment, potential future earnings—a judge would take all of that into account on custody and division of assets.”

“That's assuming there are still assets,” I said gloomily.

Randy sounded confident. “Oh, there are assets, all right. It's just finding them and, frankly, I think you're right about keeping him under your nose. The thing is, you have to tread incredibly carefully. Sleep with him and it's considered legal forgiveness, meaning you lose your right to cite adultery. Let him back in the house, which you already have, and it sets you back on abandonment, and sleep with anyone else and Rick can claim recrimination, which means that even if he was committing adultery, so were you.”

I wished it was still hard for me to imagine the man I'd loved for so long setting me up to get screwed legally. Unfortunately, those days were forever gone. “So regardless of what Rick's done, every breath I take from this second on should be beyond reproach?”

Randy nodded as she pulled out her BlackBerry and started tapping.

“Hey,” Jen said, “I thought you got rid of that.”

“Addict,” I explained at the same time as Randy said, “Emergency use only.”

“Here's what you need to do.” Randy was scowling at the BlackBerry. “Take as much money out of any joint accounts as you can and open new ones in your name. You know that list of dates, times, and phone numbers of places he called from?” I nodded. “Get everything to the PI including the
Time Out
article and tell him to get in touch with whoever wrote it, find out how Rick got transported to all those places, how it was paid for, where he stayed, who he was with, that kind of stuff. A troupe of Manilow wannabes checking out performance spaces shouldn't be that hard to track.”

I looked at her. Her face looked tight, closed. “But I'm still considering working things out,” I said, almost as a warning to her not to go too far.

“I get that, but it doesn't mean not protecting yourself appropriately, as is warranted by past conduct.”

She was turning into a lawyer. “You're scaring me, Randy.”

“And he's scaring me. Cass”—she reached over and took my hand—“just promise me: guard your heart and the boys' too, OK?”

I looked at Jen. She nodded dead serious agreement.

My heart was chasing itself around my chest. “OK,” I said. “I will.” Even though I knew where the boys were concerned, it was already too late.

Oh, and he was home by dinner, ruling out Randy's Park City, Utah, hypothesis.

It
was
hard to live with so many unanswered questions, but I told myself that if I'd been able to live with the total uncertainty of the last few months, I could live with this. We managed a pretty nice family Christmas, at least as far as the boys were concerned. We went to the Christmas sing at their school as a family, and Rick videotaped it, like a real father. We made loads of cookies for the shelter and ourselves. We cooked and ate, went to church (about a three-times-a-year occurrence), walked Cad, went to a few parties, played the new Nintendo Wii. Rick built fires in the fireplace and, while it wasn't Nantucket, the apartment smelled and felt Christmassy and well loved. The boys had the enormous box of toys from Letitia, they had their cousin, who was on her least surly behavior, and better than anything, they had Rick. They were in heaven. Letitia came over on Christmas afternoon. The boys and I were thrilled to see her. She and Rick were…cordial.

But things between the grown-ups were not good. My break from blogging was leaving me edgy. Several times I snuck into the study and pulled up the site just to see that my last entry hadn't disappeared. And Rick seemed edgy, too. He was there physically, but in every other way he was clearly somewhere else.
Patience
, I reminded myself fifty or sixty or a thousand times a day,
be patient
.

I am not a patient person.

If we'd had any kind of conversation involving
mea culpa
s, chest-beating, or impassioned declarations on how certain people's lives had turned out to be not worth living without gazing daily upon the face(s) of certain other people, I had totally missed it. And it's true that I did walk the dog quite a lot, but I was pretty sure that if such an event had been going to take place, I'd have at the very least known about it, maybe even have been asked to buy snacks for it.

Despite my endless mantra of patience, there were many moments when I debated forcing a confrontation—where's the money, where have you been, what are you doing here—but decided to give it a little time and see either if anything was going to come clear on its own or if Rick was going to initiate. At any other time of my life, even the idea of living this way would have been way too frustrating to think about, but considering the last several months, it wasn't that hard. It felt a lot like a combination of him pretending he'd never left and me sort of pretending he'd never come back. It both saddened and amazed me how good at pretending I seemed to have become.

On December 28, Rick asked if we were going to any New Year's Eve parties. Back when the invitations had come, I hadn't even been able to conceive of spending the night among dressed-up, happy, drunk people. When I said no, we were going to have a quiet family evening, I saw something—disappointment, fear, I wasn't sure—flash across his face. I made a dinner that took all day to cook. Then Harmonye left for a party, and Rick and I acquiesced to the begging and let the boys stay up for the fireworks. At 11:30 we bundled up, took a bottle of champagne (and some sparkling apple juice), and went up to the roof terrace to watch the fireworks.

The boys were transfixed and exhausted. I was…sad. I looked at Rick in the glow of a particularly spectacular arc of light and felt a tug. I remembered thinking that James Spence was better looking but that I could see inside Rick because I knew him so well. Tonight, I looked at him and knew that I couldn't see the illumination inside anymore. The light was reflecting off the window. That scared me more than anything that had come yet.

 

That night, bolstered by champagne and the usual misguided stuff about new years, new beginnings, I tried.

We got the boys to sleep, which was difficult, because tired as they were, they were completely over the top with excitement. Rick went to bed and I went to finish cleaning the kitchen. When I was done, I walked down the hall, pulling my sweater off over my head, and almost jumped out of my skin when I stepped into the bedroom, my head coming out of the sweater, and I saw Rick standing there. It was weird. So far we'd been like polite roommates. I was pretty sure this was the first time we'd both been together in the bedroom with each of us admitting we were awake. There had definitely been a little fakery involved on my part and, I suspected, an equal amount on his. I took a deep breath. “Do you want to be here, Rick?”

I saw it again, that flicker of something, fear, in his eyes. “I'm here.”

“Yes,” I persisted, “but do you want to be?”

He ran his fingers through his hair. “Are you asking me if I'm head over heels in love with you?”

“I guess so.”

He crossed his arms, walked over to the window, and stared out. The FDR Drive was bumper to bumper with people trying to get home. I should have felt like I'd already arrived there, but I didn't. “I love you, Cassie”—he turned and faced me, arms still crossed—“but I'm not
in
love with you.”

I waited for the pain. It hit. Not with the searing intensity it might have, I guess, but it did come. “Oh.”

He continued. “We're together, the boys have a family again. Why can't that be enough? Do we have to push further?”

I looked at him. I suspected we did. But I wasn't ready to push him out the door just yet. I felt a stab of longing for the sense of security I used to find in him. Everything was churning around in me—fury, sadness, fear, melancholy over what used to be, hope for the future, too much champagne, too rich a dinner. “Should we start over?” Could we?

He'd walked into his closet and was looking sadly at his mostly-emptied-on-eBay shoe racks.

I took a step further. “I know you were fired, Rick. I know something has happened. Why don't you tell me the truth and we can make a fresh start. Sell the apartment, sell Nantucket. We can make a killing on both of them compared to what we paid and move out to—Connecticut, maybe, send the kids to public school, which there is like private school anyway. That alone would cut our cost of living drastically. You can take some time. I can write. We could have a yard, which Cad would love, get into gardening. Maybe even”—I was afraid to look at him— “have that third baby we used to talk about.”

I wasn't sure why I was trying. Something in me couldn't accept letting it end without one last sincere effort on my part. I wanted to be able to look in my children's eyes and know I'd done everything I could. Judging by the speed with which he took a step back at the baby idea, you'd have thought I'd just mentioned I'd had a bath in radioactive spew. Doing everything I could was not going to be enough.

“I wasn't fired.”

I looked at him. “You weren't?”

He shook his head. “No. I quit. What makes you think I was fired?”

Someone was lying here, and I wasn't sure who. “I just thought you…when I tried to claim the expenses from Bowers & Flaum, they said you'd been terminated.”

“Who told you that?”

“A guy named Patrick in the CFO's office.”

He shrugged. “Never heard of him. He must have made a mistake.”

“Why are you here, Rick?” I didn't expect to hear a real answer but knew I needed to ask again.

He reached for my hand. He felt familiar yet new. It was our first real physical contact since he'd been home. He took a step toward me, jerkily. Despite everything, I could feel a tug toward him. Physically we'd always been well matched. And there was so much, so many years between us, that the memory of them was sweeping away all of Randy's and Jen's advice, all my common sense. He put his arms around me. He smelled good and familiar and like home and my past. I leaned into him. “Here?” I asked. “In your closet?”

“Why not?” He smiled down at me. “It's not like there are a lot of clothes taking up the space these days.”

That rare flash of humor went through me. I reached down to undo his belt.

“God, I love the way you do that.”

What had he emphasized there? Was he implying someone else had done that? Whatever. The moment was gone. I dropped my hands and stepped back. “Sorry.”

He put his hands up in the air to show he wasn't going to try to grab me. “All right.”

I didn't know whether to be more relieved or disappointed. As I went into the bathroom to take a shower, I heard him whistling in the bedroom. “I Write the Songs.”