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CHAPTER FOUR
MORNING FOUND US civil, stiff and using the fewest possible words to communicate. It was like Name that Tune had taken over our kitchen.
The night before, I’d bawled my eyes out in our bedroom amid soft, comforting three-hundred-count Egyptian-cotton sheets and the white matelasse coverlet that Joe always called impractical. Part of me had fully expected Joe to tap me on the shoulder, tell me he was crazy, take me in his arms and make sweet apologetic love to me.
The other part, the part that knew love wasn’t all happily-ever-after, wasn’t surprised when he didn’t.
By the time he’d come slinking into our bedroom, my humming anger had overtaken me. I waited until he’d slid tentatively under the covers, careful not to touch me. Then I headed for the computer and the refuge the Chinese adoption boards Yahoo! offered.
With nearly fifteen-thousand members, someone was always awake on the APC. It was the big board, the board where rumors about referral slowdowns and speedups bloomed, cheek by jowl with urban legends about how the CCAA really matched you with your baby.
I logged onto my DTC group first, that small intimate gathering of everyone who had the same DTC date as I did. There, typing furiously, mindless of typos or grammar or anything but relief, I poured out my story.
To my amazement, someone in the group replied almost as quickly as I’d hit the send button.
Oh, you poor dear. (((MerryMom))) Boys are stupid, aren’t they? my electronic angel, KidReady, had given me a big virtual hug. Let me go back and read your post more carefully and I’ll give you MHO. Hey, I saw a ladybug today, that’s got to mean good luck and referrals soon, right?
I sat back and waited for her to give me that humble opinion. We APCers were a superstitious bunch, no doubt about it. We saw portents and signs in almost everything. But with The Wait so long, and without a burgeoning belly to remind us our “pregnancy” was indeed real, we all went a little stir-crazy sometimes. Ladybugs and red threads and a million other nutty but harmless myths kept us occupied.
And who’s to say ladybugs were a myth, anyway?
KidReady’s reply came back in that strange garbled shorthand that had sprung up to save our tired fingers keystrokes.
MerryMom, I say your dh is just as wounded and hurt as you are—as all of us are. He just wants to run like hell before China has a chance to quit on him. If he keeps it up, just apply iron-frying-pan therapy to that hard head of his, that ought to soften him up. He’ll be okay once the referrals come, OK? JMHO.
Tears choked my laughter. I felt a deep kinship with the women on this board—and I didn’t even know what they looked like or how their voices sounded. But they were the only ones who really got what it meant to endure The Wait. Not even Maggie could totally understand. With these women I’d shared deep, dark secrets, given them the speech about our babies being worth The Wait, had cyber baby showers, cyber birthday parties, dried tears, belly-laughed, given out Heinous Husband awards.
Heinous Husband awards. In our sunny kitchen the next morning, staring at Joe’s rigid back, I was ready to paint one in the shape of a bull’s-eye on his blue T-shirt and then loan him out as target practice.
My chin up, my back just as stiff as his, I marched past him and X’d out another day on The Wait calendar with a defiant screech of the marker. Joe looked at me wordlessly, his eyes flat over his coffee mug.
Joe and I hardly ever had serious fights, not like some couples. A couple we were friends with had regular knockdown drag-out rows about every six months or so. They’d send the kids to their grandmother’s and throw down. I could never understand a woman’s complacent acceptance of such a marriage. I didn’t know how your love stayed intact after you’d screamed obscenities at each other.
The one fight we’d had that came close to this one was when I’d had my ovary removed. Joe had lobbied hard for me to have a total hysterectomy, which he thought would eradicate any future chance of cancer. I’d been horrified. Give up any chance at all of having a child? Never.
We’d sulked and pouted and yelled at each other for days. The morning of the surgery, I’d packed my overnight bag and headed to the car by myself. I was two miles down the road when I’d turned the car around and floored it back home.
Joe had been sitting on the front porch of the bungalow we’d lived in then, tears streaming down his face. We’d grabbed onto each other as though we were sliding off a sinking ship. “Don’t ever do that again,” he’d whispered fiercely, burying his face in my hair. “I love you, can’t live without you. Don’t ever, ever do that.”
In the end, he’d decided it was my body and my decision. The hands-off approach had been a tough one for Joe, but he’d gritted his teeth and white-knuckled his way through it.
I wished desperately today was a weekday, not a Saturday. We’d always made it a practice to keep Saturday mornings for just the two of us. This morning, though, I wanted to be anywhere but here.
The telephone’s ring gave me an excuse to escape the silent table. I leapt like a trout to answer it.
“Hey, girl, got any plans today?” Maggie asked me. “How about some serious shopping therapy if you don’t have anything else to do?”
I smiled. Maggie had impeccable timing. I’d called her before Joe got in the night before, just so she could give me a plateful of moral support. Now she was giving me a second helping. “Not really, other than pick up some groceries for Ma. Why? What do you have in mind?”
“I’m heading up to Macon to make a Sam’s run. Wanna come along for the ride?”
Ah, Sam’s, the call of the warehouse store. I shot a guilty look over my shoulder at Joe, who resolutely forked up bites of scrambled eggs and grits and pretended not to listen.
“Sounds tempting. What else do you have planned?”
“Maybe an Olive Garden lunch? And we could go by Bed Bath & Beyond.”
“Ooh, Maggie, you know how to tempt a gal.”
“So we’re on? You can get loose from His Royal Highness?”
“I don’t think that will be a problem in the slightest.”
“Oh,” Maggie said in a knowing tone. “He’s giving you grief?”
“You couldn’t possibly imagine just how much.” I kept my voice cheerful and upbeat so Joe wouldn’t realize I was talking about him.
“Aha, he’s sitting there and you can’t give me the dirt. Gotcha, girl. Sounds like you need to be busted outta there. What do you say I pick you up in about an hour?”
“Sure! I’ll look for you around ten.”
I came back to my breakfast, where the morning’s gloom settled back on us. The pile of eggs on my plate seemed to grow, no matter how much I ate. Joe, too, seemed to have little appetite.
The tension made me sick, but I was on the side of might and right, and I didn’t intend to give even one tiny inch.
An insidious voice in my head whispered just as it had during the night: Maybe he never wanted to adopt. Maybe he’s just been going along to keep the peace. Maybe he’ll never love Meredith. What will you do then?
I pushed my chair back and the thought out of my head. Joe’d come around. Once he saw the referrals start coming in, he’d be okay. That was my Joe.
Over the sound of the running water in the sink, Joe asked, “So, uh, what are your plans for the day?”
I looked at him as he sat at our big dining table. “Nothing special. Have to get groceries. Thought I’d see if Ma needed anything. Maggie just asked if I wanted to go to Macon with her, for a Sam’s run.”
“Oh,” he replied. Another awkward silence stretched between us.
If he could try, so could I. “What about you?”
“Don’t know, really. It’s a beautiful day.”
“Yep.” I nodded, turning the plate in my hand to rinse it before I put it in the dishwasher. I switched off the faucet. “Thinking about doing something outside?”
The house we lived in was a big, low, metal-roofed home Joe’s uncle had built years before. Then, like many contractors, Uncle Bob let it slide into passive neglect while he stayed busy improving other people’s homes. When Joe and I had bought it, we’d replaced the leaky tin roof with a steel one, painted the exterior, gutted the kitchen and sacrificed the tiny formal dining room to make a huge, modern master bath next to our downstairs bedroom.
The big things got done quickly, and I enjoyed my gleaming maple cabinets and the soapstone countertops, as well as the elbow room in the master bath.
Other parts of the house told a different story, though. The carpet in the living room and throughout the tiny upstairs was the same awful shag Uncle Bob had picked up at a close-out sale. The upstairs bathroom looked straight out of the seventies and the yards were still in the throes of an evolution from looking thrown-away to well-tended. Joe’s honey-do jar was overflowing all the time.
“Well, maybe outside would be a good thing.” Joe stood now and stretched, his lean frame reaching up to the ceiling. He yawned.
Maybe he didn’t get any more sleep than I did. My heart thawed a bit. Obviously, his volunteering to work outside and do some of the heavy work was his quiet way of apologizing.
“What are you thinking of doing? I have some day-lilies that need dividing—”
Joe’s frown stopped me. “Nah,” he said. “I don’t really feel like working with the flowers today.”
“Oh. I noticed some of the spindles were loose on the bedroom side of the porch. Maybe you could look at that?”
“Maybe.” The way he dragged out the word so grudgingly made it apparent Joe didn’t feel like home repairs, either. “If I have time.”
Suddenly the man who didn’t have any plans was so pressed for hours in the day that he couldn’t check out wobbly porch spindles? A suspicion grew in my head, bloomed and spread.
“So what exactly will you be doing outside?”
“I think…” he stretched again, popped his knuckles over his head “…think it’s a good day to work on the boat.”
Not an apology after all. Just the boat.
I hated that boat. It was an old rickety wooden boat Uncle Bob had left in the workshop when he and Joe’s aunt had sold the house to us. Uncle Bob had sprung for a fancy aluminum bass boat, so he didn’t have anymore need of something so labor intensive.
The problem with the boat was that a guy couldn’t ever do any work on it by himself. He had to have a buddy for moral support, and Joe’s boat buddy was his best friend, Rick. If they’d actually done anything on the boat, it might be different. But a day spent working on that boat got sucked down into a black hole that devoured any real signs of productivity.
Oh, they sanded the blasted thing and varnished it and patched it and painted it. My credit card bills told me Joe and Rick had bought tons of supplies. But mostly the guys just talked about the boat. To my knowledge, that boat had never been tested for seaworthiness—or lake-worthiness, if that was the proper term—and probably never would. That boat was an excuse for two guys to huddle up and dream up reasons to dash off to buy some tool or gadget or supplies that Joe probably already had.
My tongue very nearly spewed out hot words. It was just the spark I needed to let loose the keg of dynamite I felt I was sitting on.
I didn’t have the chance. Joe knew me well enough, and knew well enough my feelings about the boat, to make a hasty escape out the back door, Cocoa dogging his heels. He pulled out his cell phone and stuck it to his ear on the way to his backyard workshop. I knew without a doubt that Rick’s wife was about to get boat-attacked herself.
Maggie found me still blowing steam an hour later. She cocked an attentive ear sideways. “Man, am I glad to hear you’re still fluent in good ol’ South Georgia cussin’. I was beginning to think you’d been cured.”
Maggie’s empty vehicle awaited us in the drive. “Where’s LaTisha?”
“She’s at her friend’s house, supposed to be studying, but I know better than that. Still, I know her friend’s mama, and she’s a worse tyrant than me. She’ll keep ’em straight.”
I thought about all the times Maggie and I had giggled over our books as we lay on her powder-blue chenille bedspread, our feet crossed at the ankles. If we got too loud, Mr. or Mrs. Boatwright would poke a head in and yank us back in line. Nothing like having a best friend to make tough times easier to bear.
Maggie backed her gas-guzzling SUV carefully around my pine trees and the azaleas that still had a fuchsia-colored flower or two clinging to them. “So spill it, girl. What did bad ol’ Joe say about the adoption?”
“He wants us to pull our dossier.” Just saying it to a real, live person and seeing her astonished reaction served as validation for me.
“He what?”
The story gushed out of me in all its gritty, painful details as Maggie made her way up Bellevue Avenue, past Dublin’s pretty historic homes. She took a quick left, not bothering to use a signal, so she could scoot up Academy by Cordell Lumber Company.
“You mean, after you guys have come through this much hell and you’re this close, he wants to yank the plug?”
“Something like that.” I nodded my head in agreement.
“That boy beats all I ever saw. What was it like this morning? Don’t reckon he was man enough to apologize?”
“Oh, no. He’s too busy.”
“With what?” Maggie lowered her brows in suspicion.
“The boat.”
Maggie closed her eyes, shook her head and said, “Thank you, Lord, for seeing fit not to burden me with a husband. That boat.”
Her mention of being single pulled me away from my own miseries. “I was too busy last night crying on your shoulder to ask you about whether your new fellow had called back.”
“No…but his girlfriend did.”
A pang shot through me at her words. I took in the grim set of her face and knew the discovery had stung her worse than her casual tone let on.
“Oh, Maggie.” Not sure exactly what to say, I patted her arm. “That’s awful.”
“Worse than awful. It was his live-in girlfriend.”
I cringed. “Mags, he ought to be hung from his thumbnails.”
“I heartily agree. As bad as Shelton was—both times—at least he never cheated on me. He may have stolen my money and had a gambling habit so bad he would have bet on how long a stinkbug would smell, but I never had to call up an unsuspecting woman and ask if she’d been with my man.”
“What did you say to her?” I looked up to see we were racing toward a yellow light. “Uh, Maggie, that’s Kellam up there and there’s a traffic light and it’s red.”
She stood on the brakes, squealing to a stop at the intersection. “Thank you. Didn’t see it. I told that fool girl, yes, indeedy, I had been with him. That he’d failed to mention pertinent details like he was supposed to be collared and leashed, and that even before I knew he was a yellow-bellied cheater, I hadn’t been too impressed with him.”
Even though Maggie was in obvious pain, I couldn’t help but chuckle at the way she recapped the conversation. “You didn’t! You didn’t call him a yellow-bellied cheater.”
“I sure did.” She let off the brake and headed through the intersection at a more sedate pace. “I wanted to call him worse, but LaTisha was standing right there. It’s true, you know. I think the reason men wind up running around on you is they can’t scrounge up enough courage to just be honest and tell you, ‘Hey, babe, lately somebody else has been moving the earth for me, so it’s quits for us, okay?’ Pure, lily-livered cowardice.”
In the beat of silence that followed, I told her, “I’m sorry. Sorry that you had something like this happen on your first guy since Shelton. Sorry that I was too wrapped up in myself to be there for you.”
Maggie lifted her shoulders in a shrug. “It’s okay. Just caught me flat-footed, you know?” She glanced my way. “I knew he wasn’t anything special when he asked me for cash to leave a tip. Besides, I’m better off finding out now.”
“You’ll find the one you’re supposed to be with, Maggie.”
“Of course. Somebody’s gotta be brave enough to take me on. And I’m a whole heap older and wiser now. Hell, I was my own worst enemy with Shelton. I just kept lying to myself, telling myself he’d change.”
Is that what I’m doing with Joe? I asked myself. Just fooling myself into thinking once he holds Meredith for the first time, everything will be okay?
Maggie must have picked up on my sour thoughts. “I know I’ll find somebody. After all, look at you and Joe. He may be a definite member of the husbandus irritatus species, but he doesn’t lie, he doesn’t cheat and, most importantly, he won’t gamble away your life savings.” She took the opportunity at the Industrial Boulevard intersection to reach over and squeeze my hand. “I know it’s rough now. But he’s just scared. He’s afraid to hope. I’ve been there. It’s hard to get back up on that horse after it’s thrown you.”
I smiled. “Husbandus irritatus, huh? Maybe I’ll get him a T-shirt with that printed on it. He is a good guy, isn’t he?”
“Sure. Look how much he cares. He never forgets your birthday or your anniversary, he puts up with all the crap from your mother and I know more than one man who would have bailed on a woman once she wound up with cancer. Not Joe, though. He stuck by you. Shelton wouldn’t have done that, not in a million years. The only ding Joe has is Cherie.”
Her mention of Cherie reminded me about the early morning phone call I’d had the day before. When I gave Maggie the high notes on it, she shook her head.
“Now that is scary, Cherie using her pea-brain to figure anything out. See? That’s probably what Joe’s so wigged out about. He and Cherie probably got into it again yesterday before he got home, and now he’s thinking it’s all his fault how she turned out. But you and I know that young’un’s always been a spoilt brat.”
