Blessing in Disguise (37 page)

So what
was
he after?

She thought of their honeymoon in Mazatlan. In her mind, she could see Win standing on a rickety wooden dock, looking down at the iridescent water into which he’d accidentally dropped his Vuarnet sunglasses while climbing out of a motor launch. Then, before she could stop him. there he was, diving in—Bermuda shorts, polo shirt, Birkenstocks, and all. A gaggle of villagers standing there, jabbering to one another in Spanish, watching him surface, oily water streaming from his plastered-down hair, gasping for air, before jackknifing down again ... and again. By the third time, she was screaming at him to stop.
Stop.
They were just
sunglasses,
for heaven’s sake. But Win kept on. Down, down. Until, finally, he was exploding upward, arm thrust high, his sunglasses clenched in his fist, while the villagers let loose a cheer—as if he’d rescued one of their children from the deep.

“You beat me.”

Grace looked up into Win’s blue eyes, creased with amusement, and watched him settle into the chair opposite her. She glanced at her watch and saw that it was exactly twenty minutes since he’d called.

“I’m in the neighborhood,” she told him. “You must have sprouted wings to get here this fast.”

“I took the subway.”

“Since when do you ride the subway?” She laughed. When they were married. Win was always making a case about how dangerous it was, how she was just asking to get mugged.

He shrugged, looking surprisingly unruffled, considering the rush to get here. “If I’d told you forty-five minutes, you’d have changed your mind.”

“Probably.” She stifled a yawn.

“Grace, I needed to see you.” He wasn’t smiling now.

“It must be serious if you couldn’t tell me over the phone. Something tells me it
is
about Mother. Did she put you up to this?”

He shook his head, ordering a gin and tonic from the waitress who had appeared at their table. “I spoke with her last night. She’s agreed to hold off on any legal action until the two of you can sit down and talk.”

Grace felt herself softening. “Win, I appreciate everything you’ve done. I know it isn’t easy to bend Mother around to anyone else’s way of thinking.”

“I’m doing it for you, Grace. Just because we don’t happen to be married anymore, I still
do
care, you know.” In the glow of the candle sputtering in its glass in the center of their table, his eyes seemed to take on an added brilliance. Could Win actually be thinking—?

“I know you do,” she told him quickly, careful to strike a tone that was no more than friendly.

“Do you?” He placed a hand over hers, his fingers pressing into hers with a heated insistence.

Grace was gripped by a weird sense of déjà vu, feeling as if they were still married somehow.

It was almost a spell Win seemed to weave. Intimacy by implication. She
knew
it in her mind, and could often predict his moves—his reaching out to brush a wisp of hair from her cheek, or smooth her collar; the way, while waiting at the door for Chris, he would begin absently shuffling through any mail she might have left out on the small hall table. But, despite knowing better, she’d sometimes find herself falling for it. Not commenting, or even hardly
noticing,
when he drifted over to the refrigerator to help himself to a cold drink. Letting him get away with lines like, “That lock on the door looks flimsy to me—why don’t I call someone and have him come take a look at it?”

Was it calculated? Hard to know. With Win, getting what he wanted just came to him naturally. He went about it as effortlessly as breathing.

“Win, I don’t want you to get the wrong idea about—”

“Grace, I’ll be honest with you,” he interrupted. “I
do
have a selfish motive in all this. I need to know if ... Christ, I can’t even say it.” His voice cracked, and she caught the gleam of tears in his eyes.

The only other time she’d seen Win cry was after she’d told him she was leaving him. Then she’d almost changed her mind and backed down. Maybe he really did love her, she’d thought. Maybe she ought to give their marriage another chance.

She remembered how he’d looked then—seated in the tapestry wing chair before her, his head bowed with anguish. There had been a light shining directly on his disheveled hair, so bright it seemed as if it were coming
from
him, a golden lamp casting its glow along the polished parquet floor as she turned and began walking toward the door.

Ever since they’d split up, he’d made no secret of wanting her back. What she didn’t understand was
why.
What he really wanted was a woman who would expect little else from him other than the chance to adore him. And maybe she’d been that woman when they first married ... but he had to know she certainly wasn’t now.

That didn’t mean that in some ways she didn’t miss him. Or maybe it was their shared history she missed—not just memories of when they were first married, or of Chris growing up. She missed dancing to songs from the sixties with someone who knew all the right moves and could even sing the words. Watching
Saturday Night Live
with someone who got all the jokes. Someone who, when she jokingly used an old slang word like “bitchin’,” understood that it was a compliment, not a complaint.

Jack had never heard of the Moody Blues, and though he’d been opposed to the war in Vietnam, he’d never marched in any rally. When her generation was home watching
The Brady Bunch,
he’d been grinding away at Yale. He rarely listened to anything other than classical music and old show tunes, and thought a Stratocaster was something you mowed the lawn with. And his only definition for a lid was something that covered a pot.

Even when you were crazy in love with a guy, Grace thought, you could be with him and still sometimes feel lonely.

She drew her hand out from under Win’s and in a low voice said, “Why are you doing this, Win? Why
now?”

“Have you forgotten what day it is?” he asked.

It dawned on her suddenly, and she found herself marveling for a moment that it could have slipped her mind at all. Not even since the divorce had she failed to mark the day, if only in her mind.

“Our anniversary. Oh, Win, I really
did
forget.”

“Isn’t that usually the husband’s screw-up?”

“Win ...”

“I know, I know.” He held his hand up. “I’m not your husband anymore. You keep saying it. I just wish I could make myself believe it.”

“Look, you should have told me over the phone. If I’d known ...”

“... you wouldn’t have come,” he finished for her.

“There’s no point in going over the past. What good will it do?”

But Win was smiling. “Do you remember, Grace? How the organist’s car broke down and he was twenty minutes late? You were ready to go ahead. But I just couldn’t imagine you walking down the aisle without music.”

“It wouldn’t have been exactly quiet.” She smiled. “Not with your mother crying so hard I thought she’d flood the place.”

“Good thing he did show up. Your sister would have married me out from under you if we’d waited any longer.”

“Sissy
did
have the worst crush on you,” she acknowledged with a chuckle. “I almost felt sorry for Beech, even though she was only going with him then, the way she’d hang all over you.”

“I doubt if Beech noticed. He was too busy making eyes at
my
sister.”

The waitress brought their drinks, which they sipped in silence. Grace had no more than half-finished hers when she pushed her glass aside and stood up. “I’d better be going,” she told Win.

“Wait.” He grabbed her wrist, lightly, his fingers moist. Up close, she could see that his eyes were bloodshot.

“I’m tired, Win. And I think we’ve said enough.”

“One more thing.” His mouth twisted up in a half-smile she found oddly endearing ... even heartbreaking. She watched him lift his glass as if in slow motion. “A toast,” he said. “To our anniversary.”

Grace knew she ought to walk away—no, not walk,
run
in the other direction. But she felt as if trapped in warm sand. She found herself reaching out, her arm heavy and seeming to stretch on forever before closing about her wet glass. She lifted it to her lips and, in a voice that seemed not her own, said, “To our anniversary.”

“It was just one drink,” she told Chris as she was pulling her coat off at the door.

When she’d phoned the Scullys to tell Chris she was meeting Win, he’d perked up at once, promising to be here when she got back. Now, seeing his eyes bright with interest for the first time in weeks, she wished she hadn’t told him. No point in getting his hopes up.

“Was it Dad’s idea or yours?” Chris was actually grinning.

“His.”

“I thought so.”

“It was just business ... some legal stuff we had to sort out.”

“Whatever you say.” His skinny arms folded over his chest, he peered at her like some wise old soothsayer reading her fortune from a crystal ball. “But if he asks you out again, don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

“About what?” she asked, trying to look innocent.

“Dad. He hasn’t given up on you two getting back together.”

She grabbed a throw pillow off the couch and tossed it at him. He caught it with surprising agility and threw it back at her, laughter bubbling from him like water from a long-dry well. She pretended not to notice. If she commented or praised him, he’d retreat back into his shell, and this was too delicious a moment to squander.

She wanted to tell him,
We can’t go back to the way things were.
But the look on Chris’s thin, anxious face, which for the time being had lost its guardedness, kept her from saying those painful words.

“Isn’t it about time for bed?” she asked, pointedly glancing at her watch. “You have school tomorrow.”

He nodded, retreating back into himself. With an elaborately casual air, he said, “I thought I’d give Hannah a call first. See how she’s doing.”

“Oh?” Grace tried not to look too surprised. True, Chris and Hannah had seemed to get along okay up at the cabin, but when had they gotten to be good enough friends to call each other up?

“She’s been kind of down lately,” Chris confided, lowering his voice and looking around as if Hannah might be lurking in the background, listening. “I don’t know—maybe she’s breaking up with her boyfriend or something. She hasn’t said anything to me, but ...” Now Chris was giving her the narrow, critical look Grace knew all too well. “Mom, I can’t believe you haven’t noticed how out of it she’s been acting lately.”

Grace immediately felt a pang of misgiving. No, she
hadn’t
noticed. Was that why Jack, too, had seemed so distant tonight? Was there something wrong with Hannah that Jack wasn’t telling her about because he thought she wouldn’t care?

“I’m sorry, Chris. ... I guess I’ve been sort of out of it myself,” she told him. “If you talk to her, give her my love.”

Love? They both knew what a joke that was. The best that could be said of her relationship with Hannah was that, since their week of forced togetherness up at the cabin, they’d more or less called a wary truce.

But was that enough?

“Kath? Are you still there?” Hannah tapped the phone’s disconnect button once more to make sure she’d hadn’t lost her. Call-waiting could be such a pain ... especially when the person interrupting was Chris. She’d gotten off as quickly as she could without, she hoped, sounding rude.

Now Kath’s voice, reassuringly, was coming through. “Who was that?”

“Nobody. Just my father’s girlfriend’s kid. Ever since he realized I don’t bite, he’s like this overgrown puppy who keeps wanting to jump up on me.”

“You mean, like, he has a
crush
on you?” Kath sounded horrified.

“No ... no, nothing like that,” Hannah said quickly. “It’s kind of a big-sister thing.” Which, considering how she felt about Dad marrying Grace, wasn’t a whole lot better that Chris having a crush on her. “Actually, he was just checking up on me. Seeing if I was okay.”

“Why wouldn’t you be okay?”

Hannah took a deep breath. Should she tell Kath? After all, Kath hadn’t even noticed anything was wrong. Still, Kath was her best friend. And she was good at keeping secrets. Even as far back as the sixth grade, you could have pulled out her fingernails, one by one, and she wouldn’t have finked on Lindsey Webber for taking off everything down to her underwear playing strip poker with Robbie Byrnes and Scott Turnbull. And Kath didn’t even
like
Lindsey.

Hannah ducked into her pink-and-green bedroom, with its Laura Ashley-papered walls and matching bedspread, the radiophone receiver pressed to her ear, and pushed the door shut with the back of her bare heel. Mom was at work, but Ben had dropped by to pick up a chair or something that Mom was giving him for his apartment. Hannah did not want him hearing this.

“The thing is ...” She dropped her voice. “... I think I might be pregnant.”

Hannah felt a sob gathering in her, but she held it in.
Maybe I’m not. Maybe I’m only missing a period.

“Oh, Hannah,” Kath answered in a voice so low it was almost a groan. “Are you sure?”

Hannah felt her sinuses start to swell with the tears she was holding in. “It’s been over two weeks, and I’m
never
late. I still can’t believe it. I mean, like, it’s not as though we just
did
it without using something.”

“You and Con?” Kath sounded very far away, so faint Hannah could barely hear her, as if she were calling from Bangladesh.

“Of
course
it’s Con. What do you think, that I’ve gone to bed with half the school?” she cried, suddenly angry at Kath—at the whole world, in fact.

“Hannah, don’t get mad. You really blew me away, is all. I wasn’t thinking. Listen, do you want me to come over? I’m supposed to be practicing violin, but my mom won’t get on my case if I tell them you’re helping me with an essay or something. They have you pegged as El Braino.”

Sure, Hannah thought. She could ace Dr. Blake’s humongously hard physics course, beat practically anyone at Scrabble, fashion an entire Noah’s ark out of paper. But if she was so smart, how could she be dumb enough to get pregnant?