Best Intentions (5 page)

T
he kitchen window is stuck open two inches from the ledge, just enough to prevent the air-conditioning from having any noticeable effect and trap the odor of the vegetarian chili I am cooking—okay, reheating—inside. Sometime during the nutrition unit her class did last spring, Claire decided to banish meat from her diet. The children kept a food diary for a week, had it analyzed by a computer and were handed back a detailed sheet listing their numerous deficiencies. Weston takes its mission of preparing students for life seriously. They will have no part in the soda-fueled rise of childhood obesity. I have to say that the school's approach worked brilliantly. Claire is now obsessed with reading nutrition labels, can rail against artificial sweeteners for an inordinate amount of time and has developed a generally negative feeling toward butter. Whenever I drink a Diet Coke, she lectures me on its supposed carcinogenic effects in much the same way I once lectured my mother about her morning Pall Malls. Claire still devours chocolate chip cookies at Starbucks and keeps a stash of Hershey's Kisses in her upper desk drawer, but her righteous convictions at the family dinner table are legion. I double-check the box of short-grain organic brown rice—the necessity of using only food produced under fair trade agreements has also recently reared its head. Any day now, I'll need to put an ethical, political, geographic
and nutritional checklist of my daughter's requirements on the refrigerator.

When I finally reached Sam earlier in the afternoon and told him about the sale to Merdale, he was suitably outraged on my behalf that Carol hadn't given me a heads-up. “It's going to be okay,” he reassured me. “You're great at your job, they'll love you.” I shut my eyes and listened to his voice. It has always been my soft spot to rest. I used to love for him to read to me in bed at night, even if it was just a magazine. The words didn't really matter, it was his timbre, his deep, steady tone that made me feel safe, soothing me to sleep.

Sam didn't mention his meeting with a source, male or female, and I didn't bring it up, but he promised to try to get home by seven, maybe a little after. If nothing else, at least Carol's missile gave me an excuse to lay claim to my husband.

I take a sip of wine and stare out the filmy window at the alleyway below. The light is almost completely blocked by other buildings, making it impossible to get an accurate sense of time or weather; it is always the same dusky hourless gray. Everything I was certain—well, almost certain—of just twenty-four hours ago, job, husband, the intrinsic netting of my life, is suddenly flimsy, insubstantial, everything I have taken for granted now seems up for grabs. I lean over the counter and, cupping my hands beneath the window, try to force it open. The right side slides up a quarter inch and I have a brief, thrilling moment of victory before it wheezes and falls below where it was originally.

“Fuck.”

“What?” I swivel around to see Phoebe standing in the doorway.

“Nothing, sweetie.”

Her eyes narrow. “I'm hungry.”

“Dinner is in half an hour. We're going to wait for Daddy.”

“Do we have to?”

“Yes.”

Phoebe doesn't budge. I am tempted to plead with her; I may be out of work, your father may be having an affair, I don't feel like cooking dinner, please just be nice to me tonight. But parents who
practice true transparency with their children are usually those on the verge of a nervous breakdown—it is something to be guarded against. I turn partially around. “Have a yogurt.”

“I already had a yogurt.”

I take a deep breath. “All right. One cookie. Just one.” I distrust any mother who says she never bribes her children.

Suspicious, Phoebe nevertheless grabs a double-stuffed Oreo, the triumph magnified by the knowledge that her sister has not scored a similar treat. I watch her turn and hurry out. Her hair is pulled up into a ponytail on top of her head and even from a distance I can see the growth pattern at the nape, an exact scalloped replica of Sam's. When she was a baby, I used to trace it with my fingertips, kiss its peaks and valleys. Now, except when she is sick and feeling particularly vulnerable, she shudders away with a single, “Gross.”

I push aside a crumb left from breakfast. The apartment is always slightly tattered around the edges, so different from the spotless home my own mother kept, my brother and I sprawled out on the kitchen table with our textbooks and our loose-leafs under her too-scrupulous eye. She had never gone to college, which deeply embarrassed her. Her family couldn't afford it, and she had worked as a receptionist from the age of sixteen. If she pushed us a little too hard at times, it is understandable, especially from this distance.

A half-hour passes, forty minutes.

I peel the polish off my left index finger. I stare at the second hand of my watch as it jerks forward, pauses, jerks forward once more. I think of changing into sweatpants but don't. Surely whoever Sam is meeting will not be wearing sweatpants. I picture long, glossy legs, impossibly high heels…

6:30.

6:40.

This is what you do when you think your husband may be having an affair: You become a keeper of minutes.

“Same place?” she asked.

I finish my glass of wine, pour another and wander aimlessly about the apartment. I look in on Phoebe, entranced by a computer
game that seems to involve some form of pirate ship. Last week I found her playing the same game with a girl from Sweden and gave her yet another lecture on not entering into dialogues with cyber-strangers. “How do you know she's not really a thirty-seven-year-old man in Peoria?” I asked. Phoebe stared back with a deep reservoir of superiority. “You act like someone can jump through the computer and kidnap me.”

“They can,” I replied.

Behind the closed door of her bedroom, I can hear Claire on the phone with her best friend, Lily. I stand outside, trying to make out what she is saying, but it is just a low murmur of girlishness, a muted language I cannot decipher. I knock gently—a formality—and walk in. Claire covers the mouthpiece with her hand and looks up at me.

“Finish up and start your homework,” I say.

“It will only take me fifteen minutes.”

“Fine, but you still need to do it. And I'd like to see it when you're done.”

“Mo-om, you're not going to start that, are you? You never check homework.”

There is some truth to this, but in spite of that—or maybe because of it—a righteous indignation wells up. “That's not so.”

Claire rolls her eyes.

I can't remember my mother ever checking my homework, or even asking what it was. She trusted the teachers to do their job, as she was doing hers. Frankly, I think there's something to be said for that, though I'm loath to admit it publicly. At last year's science fair on electricity, it was evident that there had been engineers hired, architects employed, lighting experts paid off on the sly. One girl had built a minutely detailed replica of Yankee Stadium with a home-run sign that lit up every time the toy batter took a perfect swing at the push of a button. I mean, don't those parents ever get tired, don't they ever just feel like hiding in their bedrooms watching reruns of
Law & Order
while their kids do their homework? Of course, I don't have the courage of my convictions. Instead, I am deeply erratic; I don't check the girls' homework for weeks and then a sudden wave
of guilt will envelop me. Convinced that I am a selfish, lazy parent doing my children irrevocable harm, I demand to see every essay and math problem, though I stopped understanding the answers once they got past fourth grade. Not surprisingly, Phoebe and Claire barely tolerate this onslaught of maternal oversight, knowing it will quickly pass. Still, I promised myself I would start off this year on the right foot.

“I want to see your homework,” I reiterate.

“Whatever. Mom, I'm on the phone.” Claire stares at me, waiting for me to leave.

I walk into my bedroom and turn on the laptop Sam and I share. All afternoon, once word of the sale to Merdale leaked out, e-mail poured in from friends and business acquaintances. On the whole they assume a cautiously optimistic if reserved tone, unsure if I am on my way out or up. I glance at a few that I haven't read yet and check a couple of media gossip Web sites but I am really just biding my time, as if my true purpose will be more acceptable if it comes disguised, even from myself, as an act of impetuousness.

I double-click on Sam's personal folder to open it.

But it is, for the first time, password-protected, locked away from me.

Then again, perhaps it always has been. I've never tried to open it before. I never thought I had a reason to.

Piqued, I type in various likely passwords, his mother's maiden name, my maiden name, his birthday, Phoebe and Claire's first and last initials combined, but each time an “error” message pops up. Annoyed, I type in “fuck you.” Needless to say, this gains me access to absolutely nothing.

I go back to the kitchen. It is seven forty-five and I am about to call the girls to dinner when I hear the keys in the front door. Sam walks in holding a bouquet of yellow roses from the Korean deli tucked under his arm. “Sorry I'm late.” He kisses me on the back of the neck.

I bend my head, feel his lips on my skin, slightly chapped. “It's okay.”

“Here.” Sam puts a manila envelope on the counter in front of me.

“What's this?”

“I did some research on Merdale for you. It's not a deep dive, but at least it will tell you who the main players are.” Sam, like most men, is profoundly uncomfortable meandering around in a world of uncertainty. He craves facts, things he can fix. This is his gift, his offering.

I thank him and unwrap the flowers, sawing off the thick ends with the serrated bread knife Deirdre brought back from her last buying trip to Paris. “So what happened with your meeting?” I ask, trying to sound disinterested. I put the knife down and break off the last stubborn stems with my hands.

“What meeting?”

I fill the vase with warm water, put the flowers in. “You said you were getting together with a source for the Wells story.”

“I saw her.”

I stand completely still. Her.

The tectonic plates of doubt and distrust shift, creak.

I had it wrong, of course I did.

I rest my hands on the manila envelope, its edges growing soggy from the splattered chili it is resting on, exhaling fully for the first time all day. “I thought you said your source was a man?”

“I never said that. You must have misheard. Anyway, I don't know how helpful she'll be. She claims Wells was granted close to four-point-two million options without the board's approval but she doesn't seem to have any hard proof. At least not any she's offering up at this point. There's a chance she's stringing me along but my gut says there's something there. I just have to find it or get someone else to talk.”

“Is Simon going to give you the time you need?” Sam's editor is notoriously impatient and the recent slump in advertising is not helping him in that department. Business magazines are always reliable early indicators of how bad the economy will get. After all, not many people want to read about investments when they are worried
about their monthly mortgage payments. All over town, budgets and head counts are being slashed, victims are piling up, the death watch is on.

“That remains to be seen.”

Claire and Phoebe, who heard Sam's voice, wander into the kitchen. He reaches over to kiss them both hello and the three of them sit down at the table, waiting to be fed. For a moment I forget about the morning, about Merdale, grateful for the simplicity of their expectations.

“Okay,” Sam says once we all have bowls of chili before us, “let's hear about the first day of school. What's the lowdown on your teachers?”

Claire, fully immersed in the “everyone” stage of reportage, begins: Everyone hates the math teacher, everyone says that the art teacher is a lunatic, everyone thinks the Spanish teacher she has gotten is nice but doesn't explain things well while the other one is a total bitch (I shake my head in warning, which she pointedly ignores) but you learn a lot. I am somewhat reassured that “learning a lot” is the coin of the realm at Weston. It is what I appreciate most about the school. The flip side is that half the kids have SAT tutors by the age of seven.

“Who exactly is everyone?” Sam asks.

“Everyone,” Claire reiterates, frustrated.

“Don't you think you should wait and judge for yourself?”

“Da-ad.” I take perverse pleasure in the fact that he, too, can be subjected to the stretched-out syllables indicative of teen displeasure, though admittedly it's not as frequent. Often, I catch the girls trying out their budding female personae with him, rounding off the harder edges they sometimes jostle me with. He is, already, The Other. All I can do is sit in the shadows, watching as he accrues their gifts unbidden, almost unnoticed, leaving me both pleased—this is how it should be, after all—and slightly envious.

Sam shrugs it off, reaches over, ruffles Claire's hair and smiles. “Suffice it to say the reporting bug does not run in the family.” He turns to Phoebe. “And you, my little ink-stained wretch?” He picks
up her hand, covered in indecipherable hieroglyphics scrawled in ballpoint pen. “I suppose this is your homework assignment for the night?”

One of the great by-products of having children is how they can take you outside of yourself, yank you into their world, sometimes against your will, almost always to your benefit. Tonight, though, there is a running monologue, a split screen in my head as I listen to Phoebe describe—what? Something about doing three-dimensional art the first half of the year before they switch to graphics, or is it the other way around?

“So,” I say when she is done. “I have some news, too.” I glance over at Sam, who nods imperceptibly. “My company was sold to a bigger firm today.”