Whatever Remains (31 page)

             
That surprised her. Her practiced severity gave way to a blank, expressionless stare, her eyes raking over him. Jade did that, too, he realized: she dissected him. He’d thought it was a horsewoman thing. Maybe it was a woman-in-his-life thing.

             
“Suspended on what grounds?”

             
“Failing to disclose my involvement with a witness. Jade,” he explained when she frowned. “My dead body turned up in Jade’s arena, and I didn’t give up the case to someone else.”

             
She studied him a long, thoughtful moment – he expected a fresh batch of disdain because she was a big fan of all things by the book. But instead she nodded. “Come inside, then. And leave your shoes out here. God knows what you’ve been walking through.”

             
The house smelled forever like a bakery, and while that wasn’t a bad thing, the hominess was overkill considering Paula. With all the windows, the light inside was always honeyed and warm, also bakery-like. They had deep, overstuffed furniture and rustic tables dotted with lamps. The TV above the mantle was off unless there was a football game of importance to be watched. It was a nice house – lovely, Jade had called it – but it wasn’t the house where Ben had grown up, and he had no attachment to it. It was the midcentury farmhouse in Marietta that strummed chords inside him, and not this place.

             
Clara was in the kitchen, perched up on a bar stool like a little bird, eating a cookie the size of her head with dainty bites, booted feet swinging happily.

             
“You haven’t had lunch yet,” Ben told her, settling onto the stool beside her. “Just eat the one or you’ll be sick.”

             
“You didn’t feed her lunch?” Paula asked, going to the fridge.

             
“Why would I spoil the fun you’ll have making it?” he asked.

             
She pulled out a Glad container of what looked like chicken salad – all the past lectures of his life were remembered with an aftertaste of chicken salad on marble rye – and took up her post at the counter opposite them. Marble rye – because habits were, after all, habitual – came out of the bread box beside the microwave and sandwiches started to take shape on the cutting board. “It’s not always about fun, you know,” she said.

             
“It’s not?” Ben quipped, and earned a silent, big-eyed reprimand.

             
The kitchen, like the rest of the house, was tasteful in a bland, exacting way: crisp gray paint, white cabinets, granite counters, white window casements in the breakfast nook that overlooked the backyard. His parents didn’t have their own style – not that he did either – and there was nothing homey or warm about the room. No tacky fridge magnets; no cookie jar shaped like an animal or clutter on the countertops. It was at all times spotless and unlived-in.

             
“We’ve repainted since you were last here,” Paula said as she spooned chicken salad onto bread.

             
He glanced over his shoulder, finding nothing new to remark about. “Huh.”

             
“It was Faded Slate before and now it’s Dusty Gravel. Do you like it?”

             
“Huh.” He broke off half a cookie from the platter heaped with them and shoved all of it into his mouth at once, avoiding further answer.

             
Paula fitted the sandwiches together and reached for the bread knife from the block; her eyes flicked up to him for a moment, the disappointment in them withering. Then she turned her attention on Clara: “What are you doing for your birthday, sweetie?”

             
Had she ever been like that with him? he wondered. He had a vague memory of Chris with lipstick prints on his five-year-old forehead and of warm arms around him that time he’d crashed his bike into the Potters’ lawnmower shed; but whatever fond memories he should have had had been wiped clean. At some point in his adult life, he’d become so jaded that he didn’t even think kindly of his own mother.

             
A chill went through him. What the fuck was wrong with him?

             
“Something the matter?” Mom asked him, and he shook his head. “Here.” A plate full of chicken salad sandwich, baby carrots, and three apple slices was set before him. “You’ve lost too much weight – probably because the grocery store bag boy looked at you funny one day and now you refuse to buy food on principle. Eat that. It’s healthy.”

             
Healthy. All his childhood he’d been urged to do things on the basis of health. Clean your room. Wash your face. Eat your veggies. Wear a condom. Don’t go out with that Shelby girl because she’s got a wandering eye and you’ll never be content with that.

             
Paula had made three sandwiches and she wrapped two up in a blue bandanna, apples and carrots bundled on top beneath the knot. “Poppy’s out in the garage,” she told Clara. “Why don’t you run take this out there and you two can have a picnic together?”             

             
So the two of them could have some alone time. Perfect.

             
“Okay,” Clara agreed. Ben reached to help her off the stool, but she was four now, and she had that down pat, landing with a
clack
of her pink boots on the tile. Paula had been right about her growing; every time he turned around, she was six months older and far smarter than he’d thought capable. She’d gone from palm-size to leaping off stools in what felt like a heartbeat, and he was missing out on all the moments in between. Seriously, what the fuck was wrong with him?

             
When she was gone, Paula went to the cabinet above the fridge, stretched up on her toes and pulled down a bottle of his dad’s favorite: Johnnie Walker Blue. Scotch in the middle of the day – maybe his problems were easier to trace than he’d thought. She grabbed squat, square glasses from above the stove top and poured both of them a healthy splash. She slid his across the bar and held her own loosely in one hand, like she’d had this conversation, over this kitchen peninsula, more times than she could count. God knew how many times she’d pep-talked his dad.

             
“So,” she said, pinning him with a glance, “you picked Jade over your job.”

             
Ben looked at the Scotch, and took a bite of his sandwich instead, stalling while he chewed. “Yeah. Yeah, I did.”

             
“Did she ask you to?”

             
“No. She’d never do that.”

             
“Smart girl.” She sipped. “So all on your own, you decided she was worth reprimand.”

             
“I had to be on that investigation.”

             
“Not for the victim,” she said knowingly, “but for your girls.”

             
“Yeah.”

             
“And now that you’re suspended…?”

             
“Where do you think I’m spending the night?”

             
A smile touched her lips; not the wide, grandmotherly one she beamed at Clara, but a thin, secretive, we’re-both-adults-here smile. “Congratulations.”

             
“On getting suspended?”

             
“On getting your priorities straight.”

             
“Dad wouldn’t think so.”

             
“Dad doesn’t know what he thinks.”

             
He reached for his drink and threw it down in one toss. “So what do I do now?”

             
“You’re asking me this now? Five years I’ve been trying to tell  you – ”

             
“Mom. I’m asking you now, yeah. I’ve been – ” he hated to say it “ – running at something my whole life, and I threw it under the bus last week. I’ve worked my whole career on this goddamn spotless record, and I lied to my SO, and abandoned my partner, without even
thinking
about it. I didn’t even hesitate.”

             
Paula sighed. “It’s just a job, Ben. You’re a good cop; you do good work, and you keep the world just a little safer, but that isn’t
who you are
. I know you think that,” she went on, giving him the mother-eye, “but the Marine Corps didn’t change you. You’ve always been a stubborn, stupid little shit.”

             
“That’s sweet.”

             
“Shut up and listen. All that ‘cop first’ bullshit is a bedtime story you tell yourself so you won’t feel guilty. I know you didn’t want a wife and two kids and a picket fence house – that’s fine. I don’t care. But by some act of God, Jade stumbled into your life – poor thing – and you were so hell bent on preserving this…image…you have of your life.” She frowned. “You’ve treated her like shit. And nothing has ever made me angrier, or more disappointed, than to think I raised that kind of man.”

             
“I told you back then that I couldn’t marry her just because I got her pregnant. That wouldn’t have been fair to anybody.”

             
“Fair?” she asked with a laugh. “And what you’re doing – running to her when you need to, treating your daughter like some kind of rental – that’s fair?”

             
He ground his molars together. “This is better than putting Clara – and Jade – through a bitter divorce.”

             
“Oh, so you assume there would have been a divorce?”

             
“Wouldn’t there?”

             
Her eyes narrowed to dark slits. “Do you assume she couldn’t have kept you happy? Or is it the other way around? Do you have so little confidence in yourself that you don’t trust your own behavior?”

             
He might have come, he reflected, on purpose to have his head analyzed. However painful that was; however stupid it was.

             
“Or,” Paula continued, a note of confidence ringing in her voice, “you didn’t think you could keep her happy. That’s it, isn’t it?”

             
He rolled his empty tumbler between his hands. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Shelby.”

             
“Jade and Clara don’t have anything to do with Shelby; but Shelby has a lot to do with the way you view yourself.” She propped a hip against the counter and sighed, swirling her Scotch around. “Maybe you always thought Jade would do something to set you off, and that, stubborn ass that you are, you wouldn’t be able to forgive her. Maybe you didn’t want to give yourself the chance to let her down. Maybe you didn’t want to take that risk. But whatever the reason, it hasn’t been sufficient to keep the boundaries clean these past four years. All I know, is that if you really never wanted a wife, or a child, you wouldn’t be drinking my Scotch in the middle of the afternoon while your badge sat in your captain’s desk drawer.”

             
He studied her face, the familiar lines of it, wishing like hell he loved her instead of respected her, and wondering why the two were mutually exclusive. “But here I am.”

             
“Here you are,” she agreed with a nod. “Because they mean everything to you. And because that frightens you.”

             
He lifted his brows in silent acquiescence.

             
She folded her arms and rested them on the counter, wincing; she carried herself so formidably that he forgot her age, and all the little aches and pains that went with it. She blinked and her features softened, a maternal warmth coming into them. “Your brother,” she said, and looked like she was fighting a smile, “came to see me two months into renovating Rosewood, smiling like an idiot over Jess. He told us all about her divorce and about Tyler – and your father cautioned him that he could be stepping into a mess he wasn’t prepared to clean up – but that didn’t matter to him. He had to have her. ‘You don’t understand, Mom,’ he told me, ‘I have to.’ I told him that maybe it would be better if he took things slow and waited for a while, but he’d have none of that. And I can’t blame him; I was the same way about your father, once upon a time.”

             
She fired him one of her penetrating, omniscient stares. “You can’t love anything properly from a distance. The snatches of time are never enough – they hurt more than they help – and you know that, deep down, but you can’t make yourself quit. Now,” she said with a deep breath, “I know I’ve said this over and over, but it’s the truth. It gets truer every year. You’re not a young man, Ben. You’re middle aged, set in your ways, and not going to change. Time won’t make you a better father, or man, or husband. You won’t wake up tomorrow and be happier, healthier, or more understanding of your own cold heart. The only two people in the world who have the power to improve you are the two you continue to push away.

             
“Your brother wasn’t stupid; Chris knew what he was getting into with Jess, but he couldn’t keep his distance on the off chance they’d end up in pieces. They do hurt each other – every day, I’m sure – but those little, everyday hurts can be nursed; licked clean. A few ‘I’m sorry’s and a bottle of good wine fixes a lot of things. But when you hurt Jade, and you walk away, it festers. It breeds hate, and remorse, and all the awful things that make you think it would never work. You can’t love her at a distance,” she said. “And you can’t let her go. You” – she sounded like she was building toward something, inflection sharper, harder – “are a dumbass, son. You have a gorgeous child and that beautiful girl you made her with, and they both worship you. You are forty-six-years old, Benjamin! Figure it the hell out!”