The Actor and the Housewife (34 page)

“Put me down, show-off !”

He really was a shameless show-off , though even upside down, Becky thought to be impressed that he was so strong, especially as he was only a couple of years from fifty.

“Promise.”

“Okay, fine. I’ll talk, I’ll spill the beans, I’ll crow, what ever you want!”

Upright again, she straightened her sweater, turning to explain to the gaping spectators behind her, “I had a coin stuck in my pocket and he was trying to shake it out.”

The couple behind them smiled politely. Polly and Sam were laughing when Hyrum returned with the licorice.

“Felix picked up Mom,” Sam said.

“Upside down!” Polly said.

Hyrum scowled. “Crap, I miss everything.”

“Tell me,” Felix asked again in a quiet voice.

Becky whispered back so her kids wouldn’t hear. “The life insurance paid off the mortgage, and thanks to the movie windfall we have the kids’ college money put away. We had some retirement savings, but I’d rather not dip into that for another twenty years. So, it’s just a matter of paying the day-to-day stuff . . .”

“And can you?”

“Sure.”

“Becky,” he said like a warning.

She sighed. “I have a degree in early-childhood development, and I haven’t worked outside the home in nineteen years. I don’t have a career. I’ve tried to sell a couple of other screenplays I’d been writing, a family comedy and a teen comedy, but Karen passed, and Larry looked them over and didn’t think he could make them fly. I’ve made a little money doing technical writing by contract, but it’s not quite enough, so I’ve started working on my real estate license.”

He looked at her a long time. Her look back was defiant.

“Let me—”

“No.”

“Just—”

“No.”

“Sod it, you stubborn, stubborn woman!”

“Shh . . .” said the couple behind them. The previews had started.

“Yeah, shh,” Becky whispered. “I swear, sometimes you can be so inconsiderate. I mean, talking in movies and offering to pay a widow’s bills—geez, some people.”

“Please,” he said, a little ache in his voice.

“No.”

He pushed his fist against his mouth to still a smile.

“What’s funny?”

“You are. I can’t think why I love you. Eleven years I’ve been wondering and I’m no closer to—”

“Shh . . .” said the couple behind them.

“Yeah, shh,” said Hyrum. “You guys are worse than little kids, I swear.”

“How old is he again?” Felix whispered.

“Fifteen. Which makes him only slightly more mature than you.”

“Oh really? Is he mature enough to pull off the yawn-stretch maneuver?”

Felix yawned, stretched, and settled his arm around Becky’s shoulder.

There they were, she realized, watching a movie, eating popcorn and sipping sodas, his arm around her shoulder. Mike wasn’t there. Celeste wasn’t there. She hadn’t meant to ask the question aloud, but during the opening action sequence, she found herself whispering, “Are we on a date?”

“Yes,” he whispered.

“What?” she said, surprised by the response.

He turned to look at her, and his eyes assured her he meant exactly what he said. “Yes, we are.”

“Oh.”

There was a plunging sensation in her middle.

Behind them, a cell phone rang, chiming the theme to
The Godfather
.

The guy answered it in full voice. “Hello?”

Felix turned very slowly, looked at the guy, and raised one eyebrow.

Becky laughed, a piece of popcorn flying out of her mouth and hurtling over the seats before her.

He played Boggle with Polly and Fiona, who let him get away with British spellings until he claimed b-a-u-g-x was the way all English children were taught to spell “box.” He put new logs on the fire and read Christmas books with Sam, doing accents for all the characters. And after the kids had gone to bed, Becky grabbed him by the hand and pulled him into her bedroom. She locked the door behind them, giggling.

“Usually in such circumstances,” he said, “I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen next, but right now, Mrs. Jack, I am stumped.”

She rolled her eyes. “Get your mind out of the gutter. I just want you to help me play Santa Claus.”

She pulled bags of goodies out of the closet and instructed him in the fine art of stocking stuffing. Then they tiptoed with excruciating quietness to the family room. The filled stockings were too heavy to hang back up, so they placed them on chairs and on the sofa, arranging the larger gifts around them.

“Don’t they all know by now . . .” Felix whispered, “you know, who is putting out the gifts?”

“Of course they do.”

“So why the secrecy?”

“Because
what if
. . . what if they were wrong? I mean, what if they thought there was no Santa, but there really was? They’ve never actually seen me or Mike put out the gifts, so there will always be that tiny hope, that little piece of the child in them that believes there is some magic, and Christmas morning will make all their fantasies real.”

“What a load of rubbish. The truth is, you just have fun doing it.”

Becky giggled some more.

Felix said, “Shh.” And he arranged Sam’s new sled at a different angle.

They crept back upstairs, shut the door to her room with an almost silent click, looked at each other and sighed relief.

“Made it. One more year.”

Felix dropped into a chair as if he’d just run a race. He wore a goofy grin. “Can we do that again?”

She sat on the floor and pulled her knees to her chest, still feeling bouncy and charmed from the family room adventure. “When is the last time you had a good family Christmas?”

Felix shut his eyes. “Mmm . . . nineteen seventy-one.”

“What?”

“Every Christmas after Mum and I had our own little celebration, I would go to a mate’s house—Mark Taggart. Mark’s mum was fond of me, a real blaze of life, reminds me of another woman I know. And she loved a good holiday. The phrase ‘deck the halls’ can’t describe the state of that house. Five children, a mother and a father, loads of food and gifts and music, candles and fire blazing, tree and holly and mistletoe. It was . . . perfect.” He shook his head. “I ran over every Christmas Day, happy as anything. By the time I got back to our bleak, empty little house, I felt whittled down to the core. The Taggarts moved house when I was thirteen, and I was honestly relieved to have them gone. It wasn’t pleasant having that comparison.”

“And you haven’t celebrated Christmas since.”

“Not so much.”

“Felix . . .”

“Hey now, this is not a tragic night. You showed up the Taggarts, didn’t you?”

“You better believe it. I doubt the Taggarts supplied you with
Little
Mermaid
shams.”

Felix shuddered. “Now is an appropriate time to apply the word
tragic
.”

“It is, actually . . .” Becky felt weariness wash over her, as if all of a sudden her body realized the late hour. She laid her head on the love seat. “You know in the real story, the non-Disney one, the prince marries someone else, the Little Mermaid dies and is doomed to turn into sea foam but instead becomes a daughter of the air.”

“That doesn’t really make sense. Are you half asleep?”

“You know, I think I am . . .” Her eyelids fl uttered.

Felix picked her up and settled her into bed, sliding the comforter over her shoulders. She meant to say good night, but the lights blinked off and the door clicked shut, so she sank into her pillow and set about dreaming of sugarplums.

Felix was the first one up in the morning. He was as giddy as a little kid, watching everyone unload the stockings, exclaiming at each gift as if it were the first time he’d seen it. Then he brought out gorgeously wrapped gifts of his own, leaning forward with anticipation as each was opened. When he unwrapped the Jacks’ gifts to him, even the purple socks from Sam, Felix gushed.

“Purple socks! My man, this is precisely what I wanted this year. You have made me one happy bloke.”

Later, over cinnamon rolls, Felix asked her, “Is this what Christmas morning is like every year?”

“Pretty much.”

He stared into his mug of hot chocolate, and in Sam tones said, “Awesome.”

The rest of Christmas Day was a flurry with Mike’s family and Becky’s family. For his own sake, Felix absconded to some private club in Park City. When Becky and the kids returned home late that night, he was still gone, but there was a new leather sofa set in the family room, replacing the mangled flowered couch.

“How did you get those delivered on Christmas Day?” she asked him the next morning.

“Me? I’m not responsible. And frankly, I find it appalling that the police don’t do more to protect the honest citizens of Layton. Reckless thieves, breaking into homes, pilfering chesterfields and leaving behind these disgusting totems wrapped in dead animal skin. Egregious!”

Felix left on December 27, New York–bound for a couple of days, then on to Devonshire.

“Mum and I thought we could ring in New Year’s together. Herbert promised to spend a lot of time at the pub. Noble of him.”

Becky squeezed his arm. “You’re such a good boy.”

Felix shrugged.

“She needs you. She needs you desperately. No matter what happens and how useless it feels, know that she needs you. You’re saving her just by being there. It’s the best Christmas present you could give a mother.”

The visit seemed to go well—at least, Felix didn’t complain about it. Much. It wasn’t for weeks after he returned to London that Becky discovered diamond earrings in her jewelry box, because she rarely opened the thing, only stumbling over them when she did because she’d been hunting for a safety pin. She gasped. They were round and huge, sparkling like lit fuses.

When she called to thank/scold him, he said, “I’ve been wondering about those. So . . . did you read the card?”

“There was a card?”

“Check on your dresser.”

She didn’t find it immediately, and fearing it contained something obnoxious, like a check, she put it off . Then one day while hunting for her keys, she found a red envelope fallen beneath her dresser. She opened it. No check. Just a note.

“What’re you doing, Mom?” Hyrum was standing in the doorway in his basketball uniform, squinting at her seated on the floor.

“Nothing. Nothing. I just . . . I sat down for a second. Do you need something?”

“Uh,
yeah
. I’ve been waiting in the kitchen for like ten
minutes
to leave for my basketball game. You
said
you were looking for your
keys
.”

“Yes, right, that’s right. I’m coming. Here I come.” She looked at her hands. All she was holding was the letter. “Where are my keys?”

Hyrum groaned.

It wouldn’t be amiss to say that Becky was a bit spacey all day. Once, she even accidentally cheered when the opposing team scored a basket. On the court, Hyrum rolled his eyes.

She kept one hand inside her purse, gripping the letter in private.

What . . . what . . . should I . . . I mean, I can’t possibly . . . what should I do? Should I . . . I can’t even . . . is he serious? No, he can’t . . . we’re not even . . . this is . . . I mean, me and Felix? It’s a joke. Isn’t it?

She knew it wasn’t. Why would he say this now? How long had he been feeling it? Or was he just being noble and making a sacrifice so he could pay her bills and take care of the family?

At three A.M. she wrote a response, sealed it, and went out into the freezing March night in her slippers to mail it before she could reconsider.

1. You live on different continents for half the year.

2. She has a large family who needs her.

3. She gave her heart to her husband and it will never be fixed and whole again. It just won’t. It’s scientifically impossible.

4. You have very different religious beliefs.

5. You’re British, and she doesn’t drink tea.

6. It’s just a harebrained idea anyway, and if you actually had to spend more time together, you’d drive each other crazy, and after all your twenty-year-old girlfriends, the sight of a naked forty-five-year-old mother would throw a chilly bucket of water on the old libido, and then you wouldn’t get to be best friends anymore.

“Hello gorgeous.”

“Hi.” She could hear her own voice was tight.

“Do you really mean it? What you said in the letter?”

“I do.”

“I mean the bit where you say you love me?”

“Yes, but—”

“Because I—”

“I can’t, Felix. I’m not over Mike. I’ll never be over him, and I don’t want to be.”

“That doesn’t matter. I won’t try to be Mike. You know I’d have no hope. We’ll just be us but closer.”

“Yes, that whole ‘lover’ stuff . . . You know I don’t live that way. I’ve never been with anyone besides Mike, and we waited until we were married. The idea—”