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Authors: Haywood Smith

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BOOK: Wife-In-Law
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When we were safely in her car and on our way, I humiliated myself further by bursting into tears.
Cindy patted my arm. “Don’t cry, honey. It’s all over now.”
“No it’s not,” I wailed. “It’s all over the
network news
and the front page of the paper! I won’t be able to show my face in this town. Greg is gonna kill me for embarrassing him like this.”
“Aw, sweetie, don’t cry,” she told me. “You’re a hero. You forgave those who despitefully used you. That’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
Brokenhearted, I put my face into my hands and sobbed out, “I can’t believe Kat did that to me. I finally trust somebody, and this is what I get!”
“Good riddance to bad rubbish,” Cindy fumed. She patted me again. “She didn’t deserve you. You can have any friend you want.
I’ll
be your best friend, if you want.”
Curling in the seat, I turned away from her and wept for what Kat’s misplaced principles had cost us. “It’ll never be the same.”
Her eyes on the road, Cindy reached across me and opened the glove compartment, then grabbed a wad of Varsity napkins and proffered them. “Here you go, honey. Dry those tears. We’re almost at the club, and you don’t want anybody knowing how much those awful people upset you.”
She had a point. With a broken exhale, I wiped the mascara from under my eyes, then put on some fresh lipstick.
“That’s my girl,” she said as we turned off Piedmont into the club. “Never let the bastards see you cry.” She pulled into the porte cochere, where the cute valets opened our doors. Cindy came alongside me as we entered. “Nothing some wine and chicken salad can’t cure.”
I wasn’t sure, but didn’t contradict her.
Fortunately, I was able to keep the chicken salad down while Cindy small-talked about anything but the day’s debacle, God love her. But after two glasses of wine, I was semicomatose when we got back in the car and headed north.
By the time we got to Roswell Road, I lay my head back against the seat and fell asleep. I didn’t wake up till we got to my driveway and Cindy said, “I cannot believe that bitch has the nerve to be there!”
Kat sat huddled on the edge of my front porch with her soup pot, her eyes swollen to slits from crying.
“You wait here,” Cindy said as she pulled up to my front walk. “I’ll take care of this.”
“No!” I grabbed her arm before she could get out. “I appreciate it, Cindy, really I do, but I can handle this just fine.” I got out, then leaned back inside before closing the door. “She’s my friend.” The only real friend I’d ever had. “One stupid mistake doesn’t erase that. I can see she’s sorry.”
Cindy looked at me with a new respect. “You make me wish you really were my best friend. That kind of loyalty and grace is hard to come by.”
Spoken by a woman who’d probably never known what it meant to be really lonely, to have a shameful secret to hide.
I managed a sad smile. “Please don’t let the others be mad at Kat. I should have just called the police. It’s my fault as much as hers that this whole thing blew up into a federal case.”
Cindy nodded. “I wish
you
were running for president.”
I laughed, cleansed by it. “Honey, I am too smart to ever do that. Talk about a no-win job. Spare me.” I shut the door and watched, waving, as she backed out.
Then I turned and faced the music. Kat stood, tears running from her swollen eyes, the big pot in her hands. “Betsy, I am so sorry. Please forgive me.” Seeing her, the anger all ran out of me. “I figured you’d call the police and we’d get some publicity, that’s all,” she sobbed out. “I never meant for it to end up like this.” She proffered the pot. “I made you some soup.”
I took the pot, then gave her a sidelong hug. “Thanks, honey.”
“I’m so sorry.”
I drew her close. “I know, sweetie. I know.” Resentment is such a heavy burden to carry, and I was glad to feel it lighten. “Let’s just forget it, okay? We both did something stupid, but it’s over.”
I wanted it all to go away.
I got the key from under the mat and unlocked the front door. Inside, the house was clean to perfection, the food cleared and the rented chairs gone, bless the refreshment committee’s hearts. I drew Kat in. “Come on. Let’s put some cold teabags on those eyes. It wouldn’t do for Zach to come home and find you like this.”
“Zach doesn’t give a rat’s ass what I look like,” she fretted, “or he’d never have taken up with me in the first place.”
I stroked her frizzy hair. “Zach thinks you’re beautiful, and so do I. If you’d just fix up a little, so would the rest of the world.”
“I’m
not
letting you make me over,” she grumped.
I laughed. “You don’t have to. I love you anyway.”
Kat started sobbing afresh. “I don’t deserve you. I don’t know why you’re even speaking to me.”
Guilt must be satisfied, so I hauled off and whacked her on the butt. “You want punishment, is that it?”
Kat straightened in disbelief.
I whacked her again. “Is this what it takes to get you to let this go? ’Cause that suits me fine.” I tried to spank her again, but she dodged it.
“Quit that!” Kat scolded with a blessed hint of her old spunk.
“Make me.” I slipped in a quick whack.
Kat bowed up. “I cannot believe you’d resort to violence.”
I managed a quick hit from the side. “And I can’t believe you would orchestrate something like what happened today.” I got in another lick. “I thought you were my friend.”
Indignant, Kat retreated out of range. “I
am
your friend. It was stupid. I already apologized.”
“What about
Julius
?” I goaded. “Is he going to sue me, huh? Is he?”
Kat settled down a bit. “Well, actually, no. There was an outstanding warrant on him for parole violation, so the cops were waiting when he came out. He’s on his way to finish his term in Florida.”
“For what?” I asked. “Murder?” Maybe he
would
have killed me if Kat hadn’t intervened.
“No.” She laughed in spite of herself. “For impersonating an officer, then beating the real officer up when he found Moose in the motel shagging the guy’s wife.”
I let out a low whistle. “Not a smart move.”
“Moose isn’t very bright,” Kat admitted.
“You mean
Julius
?”
Kat laughed, the tension cleared. “Boy, when his real name gets around in prison, and it will, Moose is dead meat.”
“Serves him right.” I pulled some cold family-sized teabags from the fridge. “Here. Sit down.” When she did, I handed her the cold teabags. “These are left over from the party. Put them on your eyes.”
Kat leaned back her head and obliged. After a few seconds, her breath caught. “I’m so sorry.”
“Stop it. Apology accepted. All I ask is that we never, ever let politics come between us again. Agreed?”
“Okay.” She sighed. “No more politics on Eden Lake Court.”
“All right, then.” I turned on the stove. “While I’m heating up the soup, we’re gonna watch a funny movie. I went to the film rental place down on Spring Street and got a projector and rented three. You pick.”
“No, you,” she said.
Exasperated, I grabbed the one on top. “Okay.
Young Frankenstein
, it is.”
Kat hiccupped a chuckle. “Perfect. Nothing like a little insanity to help get over the insanity.”
“Amen, sister.”
We ate our soup and laughed away the evening, and never talked about politics again.
Till Ronald Reagan ran against Carter four years later.
 
 
K
at had always insisted she and Zach didn’t want any children. They had dogs, instead—huge crazy Labs who whipped around neurotically in circles, and fat golden retrievers that exploded hair all over their house when they so much as breathed. And at least six cats. I wasn’t sure, because they always ran away whenever I came near them. Since earth-mother Kat didn’t believe in using chemicals on her pets, their whole place was probably riddled with fleas. Yuck.
Ironic, that her hyperorganic self wouldn’t use flea powder, but she secretly smoked, puffing out tar and nicotine into the environment, along with whatever pollutants Zach contributed with his pot-smoking. I smelled the strong odor of cigarettes on Kat from time to time, yet—despite some heavy hinting on my part—she never acknowledged it, so I finally gave up and ignored it too.
As for babies, I had wanted one ever since we’d bought the house. Greg had other ideas though, insisting that we shouldn’t start a family till he finished traveling, so I wouldn’t have to manage a baby on my own.
Frankly, I’d learned to manage just fine without him ninety-nine percent of the time, but he wouldn’t budge about getting pregnant, so I dutifully took my pills.
I didn’t know it at the time, but he’d agreed to do ten years on the road instead of the mandatory five, in exchange for early partnership. But did he tell me?
No.
All I heard was that he was doing so well, the company kept extending his time as a flying auditor.
He could have told me. I never argued about his work.
But when he called in May of 1984 to tell me that he’d be coming home for good on June twenty-second, I quit the pill and planned a stem-winder of a welcome-home weekend. Six weeks and a missed period after we celebrated his return, I sat in Dr. A. C. Richardson’s office with my urine sample double-bagged and wrapped in my purse. I’d picked Dr. Richardson because he was supposed to be the best in town. As instructed, I hadn’t had anything to drink since dinner, then collected the sample first thing, a most unsanitary process.
I sat there on needles and pins, trying to concentrate on the ancient copy of
Family Circle
I’d gotten from the basket in the waiting room.
Imagine my surprise when Kat walked in.
I put down the magazine. “Well, hey. You didn’t mention coming here.” Usually, we told each other everything—except the smoking, of course.
What was she doing there? Kat hated doctors. She used chiropractors and those whacky homeopaths instead.
Something must be really wrong.
She seemed as surprised as I was to see me there too. “You didn’t tell me either.” She sat several seats away, a dead giveaway that something wasn’t Kosher.
“Are you okay?” I asked, worried.
She glanced toward the ceiling, her signal that she was about to tell a lie, then said, “I’m fine. Just a checkup.” Her eyes narrowed toward me. “What about you?”
Besides Greg, she was the first person I’d tell if the pregnancy test was positive, but I didn’t want to say anything till I was sure. So it was my turn to lie. “The same. Checkup.”
The skeptical look in her eye told me she wasn’t any more convinced than I was.
The door to the back office opened and a nurse said, “Mrs. Callison? We’re ready for you now.”
I rose and asked Kat, “Want to have lunch after? My treat.”
She glanced aside, clearly uncomfortable, but answered, “Sure. If you don’t mind waiting.”
“Not at all.” I’d get the truth out of her then.
After I turned in my specimen and got into the stirrups, Dr. Richardson examined me, then said, “We’ll have the test results in two hours or so. If it’s positive, I want to see you regularly. Since you’re over thirty”—by just two years—“you qualify as a high-risk patient. But don’t let that term worry you. You’re healthy, and clearly, your reproductive system is working fine, so I don’t anticipate any complications. It’s just better to be safe than sorry, so we’ll be doing a few extra sonograms, and maybe an additional test, just to be sure.”
“What kind of complications?” I asked, worried for the first time.
He patted my shoulder. “As I said, I don’t anticipate your having any, so put that out of your mind. If anything happens, I’ll let you know and we can deal with it then.”
Easy for him to say.
He smiled his kind smile. “We don’t even know yet whether you’re pregnant.”
“I’ve never missed a period in my life,” I told him for the second time.
“We’ll call you as soon as we get the results,” he said, then left me to dress and check out.
After I’d done that, I sat in the waiting room, waiting for Kat.
Twenty minutes passed before she came out, flushed and upset under her forced smile. “Hey. Where do you want to eat?”
“I’m in the mood for a real lady lunch,” I told her. “How about the tearoom in Vinings?”
The service was slow, but I loved the ambiance and the food.
Kat brightened. “Ooo, yes. Suddenly, chicken salad and buttermilk pie sound really good to me.”
Or their chocolate chess pie.
Yum.
We walked to the parking garage together, our progress punctuated by strained silence. For the first time since we’d become friends, I felt a barrier between us, which was disturbing, because nothing before that had ever interfered, not even sending the police to my house that time. We differed on politics, abortion, nutrition, housekeeping, medicine, the ERA, religion, pacifism, and legal marriage, but we were still best friends.
“Let me drive you to your car,” I said when we got to my secondhand Volvo.
“That’s okay. Mine’s just down the row. See you there.” She seemed anxious to get away, another signal that something was wrong.
“Okay. See you there.”
Twenty minutes later, we parked side by side at the tearoom, then headed inside, both of us carrying our lunchbox-sized cell phones, but neither of us commenting about it. Inside, we got a window table despite the crowd of women who were already there. After the waitress took our orders and brought us our iced tea, we lapsed into pregnant silence till I couldn’t stand it anymore. “Kat, what’s wrong? I’m your best friend. Please tell me. Why were you seeing Dr. Richardson?” One of his specialties was female cancer surgery.
Kat exhaled long and slowly, her eyes on the flowered tablecloth. “I … it was just a test. I didn’t want to say anything till the results came back. No sense troubling trouble.”
“Oh, my God,” I said, the air suddenly squeezed out of me. “Did you find a lump?”
Kat looked at me with pleading eyes. “Please, Betsy. Can we just drop this? I’m asking you, as a friend.”
“Okay. Sure.” It must be something terrible.
Usually we chattered all through lunch, but this time, both of us made stilted small talk for the next half hour, wondering what was keeping our food.
“Sorry for the delay,” our waitress explained when we asked, “but we ran out of mayonnaise, so the cook had to send for some, and the closest grocery store’s way down at Northside Parkway. Shouldn’t be much longer.”
Of all times for us to be tied up waiting.
Almost thirty minutes later, the waitress appeared with our chicken salad plates. “So sorry she had to make the chicken salad.”
We ate in strained silence, not saying anything till we dove into our desserts.
There’s nothing like sweets to break the tension. “Oh, man,” I rhapsodized as I savored that first, perfect bite of chocolate chess pie. Why is it that the point always tastes best? “For some reason, this is ten times better than usual. I wonder if they changed the recipe.”
“I don’t know,” Kat said, “but mine’s so good, it’ll make you slap your mama.”
Relaxing at last, we fell back into our usual easy way with each other, then both ordered an unprecedented second piece of pie for good measure, and slowly savored the carbs.
Mine was almost gone when my lunchbox cell phone rang. “’Scuse me,” I said to Kat. “I need to take this.” I lifted the receiver. “Hello?”
“Mrs. Callison?” a woman’s voice asked.
“Yes.”
“This is Dr. Richardson’s office calling with your test results.”
Every molecule in my body vibrated in anticipation. “Oh, good.”
“Your test was positive. Congratulations.”
Tears of joy spilled from my eyes. “Thank you. Thank you so much.”
“Dr. Richardson would like to see you in four weeks for a sonogram. Will August fifteenth at ten be all right?”
I couldn’t stop grinning. “Yes. Fine,” I said without a thought of looking at my calendar. “Thank you.”
“Please call us right away if you have any questions or problems,” the nurse said.
“Of course. Thank you.” I hung up in a haze of joy.
“You’re pregnant,” Kat said as if it was a great relief.
She hadn’t even let me tell her, but I was too happy to get my nose out of joint. “Yeah. At long last.” I started making plans for the nursery. Cheerful, sunny yellow, with white. That would do for a boy or a girl.
I wondered if Greg would want to know the sex.
“How far along are you?” she asked.
“Six weeks,” I said, even though I couldn’t be positive. Now that Greg was home, we’d resumed our five-times-a-week lovemaking schedule as if he’d never been gone.
I could see Kat’s mathematical mind calculating. “That means you’ll be due in mid-March,” she announced.
“I guess so.” I couldn’t wait to see the sonogram.
“That’s good,” she said in a distracted tone. “You won’t be big in the summer.”
“I wonder when I’ll start showing?” I thought aloud.
“Probably not till you’re about five months,” Kat said with the oddest look, halfway between tears and a smile. “At least, that’s how it worked for everybody else we know, with their first.”
A sob caught in her throat, and she bent her head into her arms on the table, shaking.
All eyes turned our way as I grasped her forearm. “Kat, please tell me what’s wrong.”
Before she could respond, her cell phone rang.
Kat swiped her eyes, her pale lashes clumped with tears, and fumbled with the receiver. “Hullo,” she said, trying to compose herself. “Yes, it is.”
In the silence that followed, she dissolved like a weary child up way past her bedtime. “Oh.” Shaking and teary, she hung up, then dropped back down on her arms with gulping sobs. “Damn,” she said, the hollow sound magnified by the plastic coating on the cloth. “Just damn.”
Cancer? God, no. My heart raced like a sprinter’s at the Olympics. “Kat, what is it? You have to tell me.”
Eyes squeezed shut, she sat up, turning her face to heaven, and wailed, “I’m f——ing pregnant!”
Every woman in the place stopped talking and stared at us, some with outrage and some with sympathy.
Kat’s voice dropped to a harsh, “The f——ing pills didn’t work because I was taking antibiotics!” She glared at me. “Somebody should have told me the f——ing pills don’t work when you take antibiotics!”
A murmur rose around us in the little dining room, but Kat was too upset to care, not to mention that she’d never cared what other people thought about her, anyway, and probably never would.
Too worried to be embarrassed, I got up and went around to give her a sidelong hug. “Oh, honey, that’s wonderful. You’ll see. It’ll be fun. We’ll be pregnant together.”
She stilled. “Maybe not.”
Perplexed, I held on till I realized what she meant, then let go in shock. “Oh, no, honey. This baby is a part of you and Zach, a blessing from God. It already has all it needs to be the person it’s going to be, and I know it’s going to be wonderful, with you and Zach as parents. Surely you couldn’t destroy that.”
“Betsy, we can’t talk about this,” she snapped. “I know how you feel, but it’s my body, my decision.”
I couldn’t keep from asking, “Why don’t you want it?”
She turned hostile eyes my way. “For one thing, I love teaching. As for the rest, look at me. I’m a mess, with no idea what a normal family is supposed to look like. I can’t possibly be a decent mother.”
Oh, Kat. “You’re a loving, genuine person. That’s all the requirements you need to be a good mother.” She wasn’t convinced, so I added, “Look at me. I have a terrible mother, but I turned out okay.”
The look she shot me said the verdict was still out on that one. “Neither one of us has any idea what a good mother looks like.”
That stung, but I couldn’t let her kill her unborn child. She’d regret it for the rest of her life. “Then give your child to somebody who does, but can’t have their own. That would make a blessing out of this for everybody.”
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