Antonia's Choice (4 page)

“He's probably just going through some ‘thing,'” she said. “My little brother did that.”

“How old was he?” I said.

She looked sheepishly into her Coke. “Two.”

“Right. And Ben's five.”

“Going on six,” Lindsay put in. “He always corrects me.”

“Too old to be throwing tantrums, anyway. But I'm taking some action—and it kind of affects you, Lin.”

“I'll do anything you want,” she said.

“Stop. You're making this harder than it already is.” I tilted my head at her. “I'm changing my working hours. I won't need you to come anymore.”

“Oh.” I think it was the first time I'd ever seen her approach anything close to sadness. But she recovered nicely and said, “Does that mean you get to be with Ben when he comes home?”

“It does.”

“Then I'm happy.”

I shook my head. “You are amazing. How do you manage to smile about absolutely everything?”

“It's a God-thing.”

“Well, I gotta get me some of that.” I reached out and put my hand over her very-tanned one. “I'm going to need a sitter some evenings. Can I call you?”

“Any nights but Wednesday and Sunday. I've got church.”

“Excellent. This starts tomorrow, but I'm going to pay you for the rest of this week and next week, too.”

“No! I couldn't take that!”

“You have to. It's business protocol. You get two weeks' notice or two weeks' pay. Don't ever let anybody get away with less.”

“I'm not comfortable with this.”

I grinned as I pulled my wallet from my purse. “Learn to live with it, girl, 'cause life is going to get a lot less comfortable as you get older. Trust me.”

“I'll go say good-bye to Ben,” she said.

As she headed for the family room, money in hand, I wandered down the short hallway between the powder room and the butler's pantry and across the foyer into the study. Stephanie's sheets were neatly folded at the end of the copper suede couch, which gave me a pang of sadness. She'd brightened up the ponderous feel of this dark red room with its overstuffed everything. In fact, she'd brightened up the whole house, and I missed her.

I went to the desk, intent on deciding how to set it up for
evening work, and noticed the flashing light on the answering machine.

“I'm leaving, Mrs. Wells,” Lindsay said behind me.

“Do you know who the messages are from?” I said.

“I heard one of them when we first came in—I think it was your mother, only it didn't sound totally like her. I didn't hear what she was saying.”

“Okay, I'll check it later.” Much later. I gave Lindsay a hug, which she returned hard enough to crack a couple of my ribs.

“I'll miss you,” she said.

“You won't have to miss me—I'll be calling you. And you can drop by anytime. We'd both love to see you.”

“I don't know about Ben. He didn't even look at me when I said good-bye.”

“What did you expect? The
Rugrats
rule, remember?”

She nodded, but we both knew the
Rugrats
probably had nothing to do with it.

I avoided the family room and went back to the kitchen, where I kicked off my shoes and put a frozen pizza (just cheese) in the oven. Normally that would have been it, but tonight I could hear my mother's voice telling me that Ben needed fresh fruits and vegetables—that his diet was part of his problem—but, mind you, only
part.

I pulled out a Granny Smith apple and some carrots and went to work. It wasn't something I did with a lot of prowess. In the almost seven years I'd been married, I'd been more about Chinese take-out and ready-to-nuke microwave dinners than anything homemade. My mother couldn't figure out how I'd turned out that way, seeing how Bobbi could crank out chicken Florentine with a baby on each hip. Stephanie always winked at me on the sly when that conversation came up. She and I were cut from the same dishtowel.

As I tossed the apple and carrots on the plate, something about the green and the orange that can't be reproduced in a crayon color took me right back to being six years old, sitting at the picnic table on the back patio in Virginia, swinging my bare feet and smiling back at the fruit and veggie face that smiled up at me.

“I can do that,” I said half-aloud. “What does it take to make a face with produce?”

Just as Mama had always done, I formed a grin out of carrots and eyes out of apple wedges and rummaged in the cabinet for a raisin or two for nostrils. I grinned at it and carefully set it at Ben's place at the counter.

Mama had also “suggested”—she was always careful to suggest rather than actually tell me how to run my life—that Ben and I sit at the table for supper rather than park ourselves in front of the TV. “It's going to take a few nights for him to get used to it,” she said. “But you two need some time to have conversations.”

I couldn't quite bring myself to sit with Ben in the breakfast room where we'd shared our meals with Mama and Stephanie for two weeks. It was far too empty in there now, and the formal dining room that opened from the other end of the kitchen was completely out of the question. Between the columns and the chandelier, I was pretty certain Martha Stewart herself would feel cowed. Besides, pizza and a carrot face would get lost on a mahogany table that seated twelve.

The granite countertop was going to have to do, and while I waited for the timer to go off, I pulled out a couple of fringed place mats that looked like they could stand to be dry-cleaned and made an attempt to make the counter look festive. And then I couldn't put it off any longer.

“Ben—supper's ready!” I called out.

I tried to sound as cheerful as Lindsay, though to me I was something reminiscent of a waitress at the Waffle House, barking out an order for hash browns scattered-smothered-chunked-and-diced. Ben must have thought so, too.

“I wanna eat in here!” he called back, voice already teetering.

“We're eating in here tonight. I want to talk to you.”

“I don't wanna talk.”

“I do. Let's go, Pal! Chop-chop!”

“I don't want to chop-chop.”

“That part's okay because I don't think I know what it means anyway. Come on, your pizza's getting cold.”

He didn't answer. I heard the volume on the TV go up several notches. I went up several notches, too.

“Do you want me to start counting?” I said.

Still no answer.

Forget that, Toni,
I told myself.
It never works anyway.
Lately I could get to fifteen and then drag him bodily to the desired destination and it still made no difference in his level of cooperation. If anything, he was even more defiant the next time.

I measured my steps to the family room, trying not to work myself into a lather. Ben was sitting straight up in front of the TV with his hands over his ears. It wasn't hard to figure out whether it was the
Power Rangers
or me he was trying to shut out.

I went to the television, snapped it off, and stood in front of it. Before he could let out the first wail, I squatted down to his level and said, “March, Pal. No arguments. We're eating in the kitchen. You can either get in there or I can carry you.”

It was a cheap shot, I knew, but it worked. He scrambled up from the floor and threw himself out of the family room, through the breakfast room and up onto the stool. Anything to keep from being touched by me. That part was harder than the screaming and the back talk. It was almost as hard as the “I hate you's.”

I shoveled a slice of pizza onto his other plate and put it in front of him. Then I dove into conversation before he had a chance to protest that there was too much cheese or not enough cheese or the wrong kind of cheese.

“Ben, what's up with you, Pal? Why are you mad at me?”

“'Cause you left me,” he said.

“I know that much. We've had this conversation thirty million times.”

“Not thirty million.”

At least he looked at me then, though it was with a certain amount of disgust.

“Okay, twenty million,” I said. “And you always say I left you at the babysitter. But Ben, I had to leave you. I
had
to go to work.”

“I hate that you left me. That's all. I don't want to talk about it anymore.”

The thunderheads were forming in his brown eyes already.

“Then let's talk about your soccer team,” I said. “You want to go on the Web after supper and see the uniforms and stuff?”

“Uniforms?” The chance of thunderstorms lessened a few percentage points. “What color are they?”

“I can show you on the Web. Eat your pizza and your apples and stuff.”

“You just tell me.”

“Take two bites and I will.”

Ben went for his plate and stopped. “Hey,” he said. “It's a face.”

“Yes, it is.”

I held my breath and tried not to inspect him too closely as his little face decided what to do. Then slowly he began to smile.

He smiles just like Chris,
I thought.
It takes him half an hour to get all the way to dimples.

Except for his dark hair, also inherited from his father, Ben looked like me, right down to the small nose, the brown eyes, the inevitable overbite. But the smile was unmistakably Chris's, dawning on his face as slowly as a sunrise. It gave me an ache.

“Did Nana do that?” Ben said.

“No—I did it.”

“No you didn't!”

“Yes I did! You little scoundrel. I know how to cut things up, too!”

“I hate when you cut things up! Don't cut things up!”

“Okay, fine! Ben, there's no reason to freak out about it. Just say you don't want—”

“I don't want it! I don't want it anymore!”

I could only stare at him. It wasn't just a tantrum that was being thrown here. My son was bordering on terror.

“Okay, Pal,” I said. “I won't cut anything up ever if it scares you this much.”

He was starting to shake, and I reached for him. He recoiled and threw himself off the bench, still screaming, and tore for the family room. He had the television on before I could get there, and he sat on the floor, knees pulled up to his chest, rocking back and forth. I
watched him until he stopped shivering. He only ceased to scream because his voice was giving out.

“Are you all right, Ben?” I said.

“Yes. I wanna watch TV.”

“You do that, Pal,” I said—because I had no idea what else to say.

I sank into one of the chairs. My jaw was so tight my head was starting to pound, and I sat motionless to stop the sound of leather squeaking around me before I myself started screaming.

Man, I don't know if a soccer ball is going to cure whatever ails this child.

Within twenty minutes Ben was curled up on his side on the floor, breathing evenly. I waited until I was sure he was completely out before I picked him up and carried him toward the stairs.

The feel of his warm little body in my arms made me ache again. Ever since we had moved to Nashville, he had steadily grown more distant, until in the last few weeks, he'd backed away from my every touch as if my fingers were on fire. It hurt. And it surprised me that it hurt.

Unlike my sister Bobbi, who clung to her children every bit as desperately as they clung to her, I had never been naturally maternal. In fact, although I was thirty-one when I married Chris and was well into my career and had a healthy stock portfolio in place, we still hadn't planned to have children right away. When I discovered I was three months pregnant six months after our wedding, I slipped into
pre
-partum depression.

There were so many things Chris and I wanted to do. Buy a house that was more upscale than the one we had. Go to Europe (my dream) and Australia (Chris's). Probably most pressing of all, I wanted to start my own business before I became a mother. I couldn't see how that was going to happen with a baby.

Once I got past morning sickness, my vision changed. I
could do
it all, and I was going to. That was when the first bristling between Chris and me started. Until then, we were the perfect match. Both upwardly mobile, ambitious—yet fun. We belonged to a church we both liked and went most Sundays, and I was on the obligatory
three committees. We never argued about money or pizza toppings or vacation destinations. We agreed on almost everything. Until I started making noises about starting my own financial firm anyway, as soon as Baby Wells was old enough to go to a sitter.

Chris only made a few well-aimed remarks during that period. I found out later that he thought once I cradled our child in my arms, I would opt for full-time motherhood. I did fall in love with Christopher Benjamin Wells III the minute I held his goopy form and looked into his indignant little face. I liked his attitude.

But he wasn't going to stop me from being all I could be. I tried to tell Chris that Ben would never be a happy child if his mother wasn't happy, and that his mother would never be happy staying at home. I was blown away the first time Chris said to me, “Mothers have no business going out to work when their kids are young.”

My response? “Who are you and what have you done with my husband?” I had never had an inkling that Chris felt that way. He had always been supportive of my career, always seemed to like my drive and sophistication. We'd talked about our career goals more than we had anything else in our relationship—obviously more than we'd talked about child-rearing.

And so the battle had begun—me weaning Ben at six weeks and going straight back into the fray at the Richmond firm I worked for, and Chris taking every opportunity to try to wear me down. Each time Ben sneezed or had a bad night, Chris would attribute it to my working. When the neighbor's same-age baby crawled before Ben did, I got the blame. The child couldn't burp without my career goals being held up like Exhibit A. Never until then had I resented being married to an attorney.