Skipping a Beat (6 page)

“You are the only person in the world who would ask that.”

“What else did he say?”

Just then our house phone rang. I picked up the cordless and checked caller ID.

“It’s Bettina,” I groaned.

“Why don’t phone calls come with warning labels?” Isabelle wondered, lazily tracing a fingertip around the rim of her glass. “Answer at your own risk: Contents may be toxic.”

Bettina was Dale’s wife. She looked like she’d been drawn with a straightedge: her chin-length white-blond hair was always flat ironed, her clothes hung from her frame as cleanly as if she was a wire hanger, and her nose was a sharp triangle. Bettina even spoke in staccato sentences. Once when I was at her house for a cocktail party, she’d casually discussed the merits of the various maids she employed like they were hors d’oeuvres.

“I tried Hispanics. Asians are better,” she’d announced as a maid wandered by within hearing distance.

She and Dale were absolutely perfect for each other.

“Just let the machine get it,” Isabelle advised.

“No, I’d better take it,” I said. “In case there’s a work emergency or something.”

“Julia, how are you?” Bettina asked. She didn’t wait for my answer. “I heard what happened. Incredible!”

“I know,” I said, eager to spin the conversation in a good direction. “Michael’s doing so well, and he’ll probably be out of the hospital by Tuesday.”

“I see,” Bettina said. “And what will you do next?”

“Next?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

She paused, and I could hear her inhaling smoke from one of her long, thin cigarettes.

“Michael told everyone he wasn’t returning to work. Dale said he announced it as they loaded him into the ambulance.”

I couldn’t help it; I gasped. I could almost see the victorious grin forming on Bettina’s lips. She’d probably burn up the phone lines tonight describing my gasp to everyone she knew.

“Didn’t he tell you?” Bettina inquired, her tone cloyingly sweet.

What?
Isabelle mouthed. I shook my head at her; I still couldn’t speak. Isabelle read the shock in my eyes and wrestled the phone out of my hand.

“It’s Isabelle. What’s going on? Did something happen to Michael?”

Isabelle was quiet as she listened, but I could see her jaw tighten.

“Charming,” she said calmly. “Michael nearly died today, and you’re calling his wife and upsetting her even more. Have you thought about getting a job at the
National Enquirer?
You’ve got the perfect touch. Oh, and by the way, you should wear longer dresses. Your knees are getting wrinkly.”

Isabelle slammed down the phone: “Vulture.”

I finally found my voice. “What did she mean?”

Isabelle shook her head. “She’s a pathetic gossip. She’s just jealous we didn’t invite her to your birthday party. Ignore her.”

“Do you really think he wants to quit work?”

“Nah. He would’ve said something to you first. Maybe he wants to take off some time and travel. He was probably just talking about taking a little break.”

“Isabelle,” I whispered. “Michael wanted to talk to me about something important, but I got so angry with him because of—well, because of some stuff I can’t go into now. I left the room. I wouldn’t listen to him … I went back an hour later, but they’d taken him away to do some tests. We never got to finish talking.”

I could see Isabelle turning the possibilities over in her mind. She wanted to console me, but she’d never lie to me.

“Okay,” she finally said. “Here’s the plan. Tomorrow morning you go to the hospital first thing and talk to Michael. Find out what’s going on. We’ll figure out what to do from there.”

“You’re right,” I said. Somehow my voice stayed even, but my mind churned in panic. Michael wanted to quit work? What the hell was going on? What had really happened to him during those lost four minutes and eight seconds?

I reached over and grabbed the soft throw blanket from the arm of the couch, wrapping it around my shoulders. Suddenly I was so cold.

“Oh, God, the party. If Michael’s still acting like this …”

She shrugged. “So we’ll cancel it. More cake for us.”

“Would you mind if we did? I just don’t know if Michael’s going to be back to normal by then,” I said.

Isabelle looked at me, and her brow furrowed. “I think this calls for a margarita. I’ll make some. Don’t worry; you won’t get a hangover. They’re in the same alcohol family as sangria.”

“They are?” I asked dumbly.

“Sure. They both end in
aah
, don’t they?”

I smiled despite myself. “But you’ve got a date tonight,” I said.

Don’t go
, I thought. “You should get going.”

“First of all, my date is with a guy named Norm whose pride and joy is his collection of antique rifles. Try and tell me he isn’t compensating for something.”

“But there isn’t anything we can do tonight,” I said, taking a slow, shuddering breath. “I’ll be fine. Really.”

“I’m not leaving you alone to go out with Norm, proud owner of a musket.”

I snorted again—but in a graceful way, of course. I’m told they teach my snort in debutante school. “Okay,” I said, feeling as though the coating of ice around me was breaking up, allowing warmth to flow back into my body. I felt so absurdly grateful that Isabelle was taking charge that I blinked back tears. But I know Isabelle saw them; she doesn’t miss much.

“And secondly,” Isabelle said, reaching for my hand and squeezing it. “There
is
something we can do tonight.”

She reached for the television remote and held it aloft like a trophy as she smiled her wonderful smile:
“Project Runway’s
on.”

I felt the last vestiges of my panic subside. “I may have some chocolate stashed away. Purely for emergencies, of course.”

“Project Runway
, chocolate, and margaritas,” Isabelle said. “And suddenly, all is right with the world again.”

Seven

“I SHOULD’VE TOLD YOU first.”

Michael was trying to look chastened, but his eyes refused to cooperate. They were bright and cheerful, like he’d just enjoyed an exceptionally long night’s sleep. But sleep was Michael’s mortal enemy; he bitterly resented the four or five hours it stole from him every night. If he could’ve taken sleep to court for theft, or challenged it to a street fight, he would have.

“You just can’t—can’t decide something like this without talking to me,” I sputtered.

“Julia, honey, I don’t have a choice. I feel like I have to do it.”

“So you’re going to quit? Fine. Then what happens in six months, when you get bored and want to go back to work? I know you, Michael. I promise you you’re going to go stir-crazy. It won’t even take six months. It’ll take six
days
. And then what? If you hire someone else to run the company, things are going to get tricky. There’ll be buyouts and maybe a lawsuit—”

“I’m not going to change my mind.”

A doctor in a white coat walked in just then, and I turned to her in relief.

“Doctor? I’m sorry, could I ask a question? I’m his wife, and I need to know what medications he’s on. He’s not acting like himself.”

She shook her head, and her long blond ponytail swished from side to side in a way I considered very undoctorly. “Nothing that would affect him mentally.”

“No Xanax?” I asked. “Are you sure? Can you double-check? Because I’ve been on Xanax before and I’m pretty sure he’s taking it. Maybe he got mixed up with another patient.”

“The chief of cardiology is personally overseeing his care,” she said, wrinkling her pert little nose. “I promise you there’s no mix-up.”

“Honey,” Michael said. “I know it’s a lot to take in. But will you just trust me? I promise it’s the right thing.”

“Sure,” I said, tossing a fake smile at Michael. “What about a head injury?” I whispered urgently to the doctor. “He probably whacked his head when he fell.”

“I can hear you perfectly well, and I didn’t whack my head,” Michael protested.

“Don’t listen to him,” I said to the doctor. “Check his pupils.”

Or maybe it was the doctor who’d screwed up, I thought, narrowing my eyes as I appraised her. She appeared far too young and perky to be a real doctor. Maybe she was a resident—but weren’t they supposed to be all exhausted and hollow-eyed? I peered at the name sewn onto her coat in blue stitching, vowing to Google her later and maybe, I thought wildly, submit her as a candidate for a
Dateline
exposé.

“Julia,” Michael said in a pleading tone. I turned to him, this stranger in a hospital bed who was masquerading as my husband. Not work? Michael never
stopped
working.

“Could you give us a minute?” Michael said to the doctor, who left the room—a bit too slowly, it seemed to me. She was probably about to call her cheerleader friends to gather around a bowl of Jiffy Pop and enjoy the show.

Michael took a deep breath. “I haven’t been a good husband,” he began, his voice gentle. “I want us to start over. I’m going to make you so happy, if you’ll just let me.”

I stared at him, so stunned I couldn’t speak. Earlier in our marriage, the sincerity in his words might’ve stripped away the hard protective layers around my heart. Maybe it would’ve even sent me leaping into Michael’s arms, like we were in the closing scene of some Hollywood romantic comedy—the couple that fell in love, lost each other, and then reconciled as the heart monitors beeped wildly in celebration and concerned nurses rushed into the room, then broke into applause.

Michael wanted to start over? His timing would’ve been funny, if it wasn’t so sad. In my wallet was a business card for a divorce lawyer. I’d had it for a while, but I hadn’t made the call. The card was a security blanket of sorts; it meant I could walk away—if I was willing to risk leaving behind our lifestyle. But things weren’t that bad, at least not yet.

“Let’s say you stop working,” I finally said, ignoring his question. “What are you going to
do?”

Michael smiled broadly, like he was a game-show contestant and this was the big bonus question he’d been waiting for. “I’m going to sell my company,” he said.

I gasped and grabbed the arms of my chair. Suddenly the room seemed to be shrinking. Nausea rose in my throat, and I closed my eyes against the dizziness that engulfed me.

“Sell your company?” I repeated dumbly.

I didn’t think anything Michael could say could shock me more, but I was wrong.

“I want to donate everything I have to charity.” He looked at me as if he wasn’t just shattering all of our dreams. As if he was giving me a gift. “My company ruined me, Julia, and it almost destroyed us. I know you’re not happy; you haven’t been in years. The things I’ve done, the people I’ve screwed over …” His voice trailed off while my mind flashed to Roxanne, the former publicity director for his company. He could blame his company all he wanted, but it was his affair with Roxanne that had upended our marriage.

“I’ve gotten a second chance,” Michael was saying. “How many people get one? Now I need to fix everything I did wrong in my life.”

Eight

I SWEAR THE PRENUP seemed to make sense at the time. It was even—that thudding sound you hear is my head repeatedly whacking itself on a table—
my idea
. But to understand why I wanted a prenup, you first need to understand my relationship with my father.

I was a daddy’s girl from the day I was born. And who wouldn’t be, in my place? My dad was the first guy you’d ask if you needed help moving furniture or had an extra ticket to a ball game; he was the kind of father who made a Wednesday night dinner seem like a New Year’s Eve party.

“Mr. Tolson shoplifted another Snickers bar today,” Dad would say, piling his plate high with mashed potatoes and chicken breasts as he recounted his day at the small general store he and my mom owned. “Stuck it right down the front of his pants. He’s a genius, that guy. He knows I’m never going to reach down there and risk grabbing the wrong thing.”

“Steven!” Mom would admonish him while I cracked up, and then my dad would lean over and kiss her, and Mom would start laughing, too. Mom always said that, when I was a baby, Dad was the only one who could rock me to sleep. As a kid, I was happiest perched up on his broad shoulders. When I became a teenager, Dad and I went out every Sunday afternoon, just the two of us, to run errands. He never once turned on the radio but instead asked me about my teachers and friends. He listened so intently and laughed so easily that he made me feel like I was a good storyteller, too. On Saturdays, when our store was busiest, our little family worked there together. Mom bagged groceries while Dad ran the cash register and I stocked the shelves.

We were happy. Happier than most families, I think. Even though there were only the three of us, our house never seemed quiet or empty, and although sometimes I secretly wished for a sister, I knew I was lucky to have parents who loved me so much.

Sometimes I wonder how and why everything began to change. Dad had always been a man with big appetites, a guy who lived a small life in an oversize way. He devoured second helpings of dinner before Mom and I finished our first ones. People always flocked around him, crossing the street to greet him and slowing down their cars so they could lean out the window and chat when they saw him working in our front yard. Sometimes I wondered: Had this hunger always been buried inside my father, like a seed waiting for the right conditions to break through the ground and grow so big and strong that it cast a dark shadow on the sunniest days?

We didn’t suspect anything for so long. The urgent, whispered phone calls; the five percent discount Dad suddenly offered customers if they’d pay cash; even the time our electricity was cut off at home and we had to store our perishables in a neighbor’s freezer and eat dinner by candlelight.

“The check must’ve gotten lost in the mail,” my father fumed, while my mother and I watched him silently, somehow unable to ask why the electric company wouldn’t have sent a warning and another bill first.

Then, during my sophomore year of high school, a year before Michael and I met, a guy named Brian Lucker swaggered up to my locker and asked me to his senior prom. I managed to stop gaping long enough to stutter out a yes. If there was a handbook for girls’ crushes in our high school, Brian would be the cover boy: He was tall, dark, and a running back on the football team.

I had some babysitting money saved up, and I decided to use it to buy my first formal dress. I knew better than to ask my parents to buy me one. The bumper had fallen off their truck after Dad had been in a fender bender, and they hadn’t had it fixed. Our phone had been cut off for a week the previous month, and even though Dad muttered about idiots at the phone company mixing up our bill with some delinquent’s, I sensed something was terribly wrong. My mother wasn’t smiling as much as she used to, and once when I woke up in the middle of the night to use the bathroom, I walked past her sitting at the kitchen table. I spoke her name twice before she looked up.

“Hi, sweetie … I couldn’t sleep so I came in here to get a snack,” Mom said, but the table in front of her was bare.

But whenever I started to get really scared—when the knot in my stomach grew so big I had trouble eating—Dad would sweep in the door carrying a box of Mom’s favorite dark chocolate-covered caramels and a handful of the glossy fashion magazines I adored. He’d make a production of sitting down with his checkbook and paying the bills with a flourish. “Are my favorite girls free for dinner, by any chance?” he’d say, and we’d head to the pizza place, where Dad would overtip the waitress and insist on ordering ice-cream sundaes. “Don’t skimp on the fudge!” he’d shout, and people sitting on stools at the counter would swivel around to look at him as he pumped his fist in the air and grinned. “We’re a family of fudgeaholics and we’re not ashamed of it!” During those magical times, I believed everything would be okay. No, I
let
myself believe it.

A week before I planned to go dress shopping with my girlfriend, Sara, who’d been invited to the prom by one of Brian’s buddies, Dad surprised me. He was waiting for me outside of school in his old Ford pickup truck. The bumper was still missing.

“Thought I’d give you a ride to Becky’s,” Dad said. “You’re sitting today, right?”

I nodded and happily hopped in, inhaling the faded-wood smell of Dad’s Old Spice cologne. It had been a while since Dad and I had ridden together. He’d been too busy lately for our Sunday drives.

“Is Mom at the store alone?” I asked.

“Mmm-hmm,” Dad said absently, his eyes on the road.

“It must’ve been a quiet day. You know, for you to get away,” I offered, but Dad didn’t say anything else. We rode in silence for a moment, and I could feel tension in the car, as thick and bulky as a passenger squeezing onto the seat between us. For the first time, my fingers struggled with the urge to reach for the radio button.

“I hate to ask this,” he finally said, his eyes fixed straight ahead. “Julie, the thing is, a bunch of people didn’t pay their bills this month. I had to extend them credit. They’ve all got families, so what could I do? But I need to pay our suppliers, and I’m short. It’s just for a few days.”

I told him where to find the babysitting money I’d been saving in the sock drawer of my dresser and tried to swallow the sour taste that filled my throat.

Just for a few days, Dad had said. But a week passed, and he made no mention of the money.

The next Friday, Sara turned to me in gym class while we waited in line to do the rope climb. “We’re on for tomorrow, right?” Her mother had offered to drive us to the next town over, where there was a decent-size shopping mall.

“I’m thinking of getting something cut really low in the back,” Sara announced. “I saw this model wearing a dress like that in
Seventeen
. She looked so cool.”

I could feel the envious eyes of the other girls on us, but that wasn’t why I didn’t reply.

“Hello? Julie?” Sara asked, sounding annoyed.

“Sorry,” I said. My throat tightened, making it hard to force out even that single word.

“She’s thinking about Brian,” someone said and giggled.

“Wouldn’t you be?” another girl sighed. “You’re so lucky, Julie.”

“Pick you up at nine tomorrow?” Sara said as we shuffled forward in line. “I’m getting a manicure, too. I want to get going early.”

I hesitated, then finally nodded. “Sure.”

I approached Dad cautiously that night. He hadn’t met my eyes at dinner, and when Mom asked if he wanted more salad, he’d barked at her, then apologized and shoved back his chair and left the table, even though his plate was half-full.

“Dad?” I poked my head into his bedroom. He was lying on top of the teal polyester bedspread, fully clothed. Even his shoes were on. Dad hadn’t bothered to turn off the overhead light, and his right forearm was draped over his eyes. For one terrifying moment the thought flashed through my mind that he was dead. Then I saw his chest slowly rise and fall.

“Are you asleep?” I asked softly.

The silence stretched out so long that I almost turned around. Then he said, “Nope.”

“I was just wondering about the money I loaned you.” I swallowed and looked down at my toe tracing an imaginary line back and forth across the room’s threshold.

Dad didn’t say anything.

“I could get it out of your wallet,” I said tentatively. Dad always put his wallet and keys in a little white dish on his bureau, and I could see them there now. I began to slowly walk across the room. When his voice exploded, it felt like a punch to my gut.

“Damn it, Julie! I don’t have the money. Now get the hell out!”

I froze. Dad never talked to me this way; he never talked to
anyone
this way. This was the man who used to toss me high into the air at the river and never fail to catch me as I splashed, squealing and laughing, into the water; the guy who stepped in powdered sugar every Christmas Eve and walked around the house so I’d wake up and think Santa had tracked snowy footsteps everywhere, long after I was too old to believe in sleigh bells and magic.

“Get out!” Dad bellowed again, and as I fled, I remembered his white fingers clenching the steering wheel as he’d asked me for the loan, and him peeling away from Becky’s house without even saying good-bye, leaving me standing on the sidewalk staring after him.

I called Sara early the next morning and told her I had a sore throat and couldn’t go to the mall. She believed me, because my voice was so husky from crying. Two days later, I told Brian my parents weren’t letting me go to the prom after all. He ended up taking another girl, and he ignored me from then on.

Dad never mentioned the money again, and neither did I.

But it wasn’t because of a stupid dress that I was so angry at my father. It was because he destroyed our family.

By the fall, creditors were calling our house and store. Dad had borrowed heavily against both, and he wasn’t paying his loans. He’d gambled away everything on lottery tickets, on sporting events, on poker games—on any bet he could find. By now he was going to Atlantic City every week or so, too.

“I work hard,” he snapped at my mother whenever she voiced an objection. My mom hated conflict, and she was too weak to challenge him when he got angry. He never used that against her until gambling began to consume him—then anger became his most effective weapon in cutting off conversation. “So I take a night for myself every once in a while,” Dad would say, his voice rising, just before he slammed the door behind him. “What’s the big deal?”

One evening a month or so after the prom I didn’t attend, I opened our front door and slipped through the house, intending to go right to my bedroom. I’d been avoiding my parents as much as possible. But I heard my mother’s voice in the living room, and something told me to stop and listen. “How much did we lose?” I heard her say.

“It’s going to turn around for me,” Dad said. His voice was so tight and shrill I almost didn’t recognize it. “I swear to you, we’re going to be fine.”

They were sitting side by side on the couch, not looking at each other. Neither of them had bothered to turn on a light, and the room was so shadowy I couldn’t see their faces.

“How much?” my mother asked. “The store? Please tell me you didn’t borrow against the store.”

“Eliza, I promise you I’m going to win it back,” Dad said.

“The house?” Mom asked. Where his voice was shiny and anxious, hers was dull and worn, the flip side of a penny that was glinting in the sun but tarnished underneath.

“I swear to you,” Dad repeated feverishly. “I’ve had a bad streak, but do you know how much I won last week? Two thousand dollars. In one night! I’m so close to turning it around. Baby, just hang on. We’ll get back to where we started, then I’ll quit.”

“Oh, Steven,” my mother said, and the desolation in her gentle voice broke my heart.

Nothing stopped him from gambling, not when the bank foreclosed on the general store that winter, not when our pickup was repossessed a few months later, not even when we were evicted from our house and had to move in with Dad’s brother and his wife during the summer before my senior year of high school.

If I hadn’t met Michael a few months earlier, I don’t know what I would have done. Run away, maybe, or quit school and gotten a job so I could move out. Everyone was miserable; my aunt was so angry at our intrusion that she marched around with her mouth in a thin, tight line, barely speaking except when she and my uncle were fighting behind their closed bedroom door, and my mother just looked wan and colorless, as though she’d given up on life and was waiting for it to be over. All the joy had seeped out of us, and the worst part, the
part I
could never forgive him for, was that Dad didn’t stop. He tried to borrow from the neighbors, from his friends, even from the mechanic at the auto shop, a guy with tattoo sleeves on both arms. He put an oil-stained hand on Dad’s shoulder and I caught him whispering, “Get help … I’ve been there …,” while I stared at a blue-inked Marilyn Monroe flirting on his thin forearm and wondered when I’d started to feel so old.

It felt as though our family had been ripped open and exposed for everyone to see, with our problems spilling out like the ugly gray stuffing of a once-smiling teddy bear. Sometimes Dad stayed away for more than a night, and I knew he’d found his way up to Atlantic City again, probably by hitchhiking. I could barely stand to be in the house at those times, knowing either Dad would come home all manic, trying to make up for a year’s worth of pain with gifts and glib charm that would quickly evaporate, or he’d be dark and withdrawn.

Dad and I never went for a ride together again.

So you see, the prenup was my way of trying to protect myself. When Michael and I got married, he was still struggling to get his new company off the ground, and he owed tens of thousands of dollars in loans from college and business school. I earned more money than he did at that point, and I had less debt. I had no doubt Michael would be successful, but as much as I loved him, as much as I wanted to, I couldn’t bring myself to gamble on him.