Hanging by a Thread (5 page)

“Yeah, but see, here's the thing, Luke's totally okay with not having kids. We already discussed it. He says what we have, just by ourselves, is fine.”

Nobody knows more than I what Luke would say, or do, to protect Tina. But I can't let this go.

“That's not what he said to me,” I say gently, and her eyes flash to mine.

“Oh, yeah? And when was that? When we first got married? Before that, when we were just kids? I'm his freakin'
wife,
Ellie. I think maybe what he tells me carries a little more weight that something he might have said to you ten years ago.”

“I'm not talking ten years ago. I'm talking last month at his parents', when J.J. and Julie came in from Jersey with the new baby.”

Confusion knots her brows. “Where was I?”

“I dunno, in the bathroom, maybe? Anyway, Luke came into the kitchen, holding the baby. Said the only thing that could make it better was if the baby was his.”

Her fingers tighten around the glass; she lifts it, remembers the butts floating in there like dead fish, clunks it back down. “I don't believe you.”

“You can ask Frances. She was there.”

We stare at each other for several seconds, then she awkwardly skootches out of the booth, grabbing her coat and punching her arms through the sleeves. “I always thought I could count on you,” she says, her words trembling. “Just goes to show how much I knew.”

She throws money down on the table, then grabs the bakery box with Luke's Napoleons and storms out. Without even a hint of a stagger.

I ache with that dull pain that comes from being torn between wishing you could turn back the clock and acceptance that you can't. I slide out of the booth, slip my coat back on and settle up with Jose. For a second or two, I consider leaving the éclairs—they seem tainted now, somehow—then reason prevails and I return to the booth to retrieve them. I cram on my hat and button up, almost looking forward to the slap of frigid air in my face.

On autopilot, I start back home, huddled against the cold, my own thoughts not much less screwy than Tina's are right now, I don't imagine. I'm shattered that there's no way I can be objective about this, whether I understand—in theory—her dilemma or not. In fact, it stuns me, how much I'm against her having an abortion. Because doing it behind her husband's back…how is that right? But if she tells him…

I know Luke. There's no way he'd ever make Tina have that baby if she really didn't want it. But it would kill him, I know it would, if she didn't.

Hunger, cold and confusion have joined forces in an attack at the base of my skull. I quicken my pace as if I can outrun this irritable, judgmental, hypocritical person trying to take
over my body. All I want right now is my grandfather's house and my brisket and my kid and, if I hurry,
Will and Grace—

A hand snakes out of the darkness and grabs my wrist, spinning me around as I let out a scream loud enough to reach Yonkers.

“J
esus, Ellie!” Luke winces, letting me go. “You trying to deafen me or what?”

“What did you expect, skulking in the shadows like that! I nearly peed my pants—!” My eyes go wide. “Were you
following
me?”

“No, numbskull, I was following my wife—”

“Who is out there, please?” heralds a delicate, musical voice from several houses away. We glance up to see a tiny silhouette standing on her top step, haloed by a yellowish light. “Ellie Levine? Is that you?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Patel,” I say, moving closer so she can see me, shielding my eyes from flamingo spotlights. “It's me. And Luke.”

“Luke? My goodness, you two gave me a fright!”

“Sorry, Mrs. P.,” Luke calls out. “I just startled her, I guess. It's okay.”

The woman shuffles back inside her front door as Luke grabs my arms and crosses the street, making me hotfoot it beside him. Like all the Scardinares, Luke's not particularly tall—maybe five-eight—but he's built like Fort Knox and he's got a grip like iron. Especially when he's pissed. Which is my guess, at the moment.

“Where're we going?”

“Back to your place. I'm freezing my ass off out here. What's in the box?”

“Tina brought me éclairs. You're getting Napoleons. Which she expects you to be home for when she gets there,” I point out. The cold has exponentially expanded the Coke in my bladder, my urgent need to pee distracting me from the potentially disastrous track this conversation could take if I'm not careful. Not that I have any intention of blabbing her secret, but Luke has been able to see inside my brain before we were potty trained.

Maybe I shouldn't think about potties right now.

“So if you knew where we were,” I say, “why didn't you just come inside?”

He snorts. “Like she'd be real happy to know I followed her, for one thing. And like it would've done any good, for another. I figure I've got a much better chance worming the truth out of you—hey!”

I may be short, but these thunder thighs come in handy for sudden stops.

“And if that's what you really think, buster—” I say, peering up at him from underneath the slouched beret, my arms crossed—sorta, this coat is kind of bulky “—you can just haul your butt right back home.”

He gives me one of his sullen, hooded looks, shakes his head and turns back around, continuing down the block. I wrap my scarf more tightly around my neck and trudge after him. When we get to my steps, he stops, his breath puffing in front of his face.

“Can I come in?”

“I told you, I'm not—”

His gaze slams into mine, knocking my breath on its butt.

“And maybe I just need to talk, okay? To somebody who might actually listen. But who won't go nuts on me, either.”

I'm starving, PMSing and my best friend has just dumped a secret on me I have no idea what to do with. He's assuming a lot here.

“Fine,” I say, pushing past him and on up the stairs, wondering just how long I'd hold up in an interrogation type situation.

Guess I'm about to find out.

 

Funny. Luke and I talk probably two or three times a week, but I'm just now realizing we haven't been alone together since before he and Tina got married. Not really a conscious decision, I don't think, as just something we naturally fell into, considering the situation. No sense giving tongues a reason to wag and all that. So it's been a long time since Luke's been in my kitchen without Tina being there, too. The last time being…gee, I guess not too long after I realized I was pregnant.

I open the fridge to get the brisket; he reaches around me to get a bottle of grape juice, his arm grazing my shoulder. I smell the cold on him, his aftershave, the residue scent from his leather jacket, which he's draped across the back of the kitchen chair just like he has for the past ten years. He smells like a man, not the hot, sweaty boy who used to pin me down and tickle me mercilessly when we were kids.

We separate, him to find a glass, me to thunk the foil covered pan onto the counter. I slice brisket as he pours—
glug, glug, glug
—while Mario boops and beeps from the living room. My grandfather didn't seem particularly surprised to see Luke, but I'm sure I'll get the third degree later.

I steal a glance at Luke as I plop three slices of brisket on a plate. He's wearing a thermal Henley and snug jeans, worn
Adidas, muscles I still can't quite believe are there (he was pathetically scrawny as a kid). He keeps his dark hair short these days, hugging his scalp. I get the impression he thinks it makes him look tougher. Maybe it does, I don't know. The planes of his face do seem sharper, though. Although the long, black lashes kinda kill the effect.

Intense, dark eyes meet mine; one brow lifts. Heat rising in my face, I duck back into the fridge for leftover peas, noodles, thinking I can't remember the last time I had a man in my kitchen. Had a man
standing
in my kitchen. That
there was
a man standing in my…oh, never mind.

I don't get out much, can you tell?

Silence blankets the room, more pungent than the aroma of rewarmed brisket. Luke sips his juice, watching me, as I remove my delayed dinner from the microwave, carry it to the table in the pumpkin-orange kitchen I keep threatening to repaint, one of these days. I hear Luke's glass clunk onto the counter, our unspoken thoughts stretching between us like tightropes neither of us dares to cross.

“You're uncomfortable,” he says softly.

“A little, maybe.”

“Me, too.”

I carefully cut my meat, fork in a bite, chew, swallow. I'm too hungry to not eat, even though I don't really want to. This weird, three-way friendship between him and Tina and me is based, if nothing else, on our being able to trust each other implicitly. That confidences are inviolate. We only have one rule—that the only secrets we keep from each other are those that would do more harm than good to reveal.

A rule I find I like less and less as time goes on.

“So you're really not gonna tell me what she said.”

I get up to get a glass of milk. “I'm really not.”

“Okay, then how's about I tell you how things look from my perspective, and you can just nod if I'm getting warm.” I re
turn to the table with my milk, which I nearly spill when he says, “She wants out of the marriage, doesn't she?”

“What? No! Ohmigod, Luke—” I crash into my chair. “Where on earth is this coming from—?”

Leo ambles into the kitchen, gives me a hard look. “You okay? I thought I heard you scream.”

“That was hardly a scream, Leo, sheesh.” But he's already spotted the Oxford box. “What's in there?”

“Éclairs. Take one.”

He undoes the box, grinning at me and winking at Luke. “Then make myself scarce, right?”

“That'll do.”

Chuckling, he gets a plate down from the cupboard, lifts out one of the éclairs. He nods his head in my direction but says to Luke, “You think she looks run-down?”

“Leo, for God's sake—”

“Yeah,” Luke says, eyeing me. “I do.”

“See…” My grandfather licks his fingers as he looks at me. “He agrees with me, you're working too hard.”

This would be an opportune moment to point out I probably wouldn't look so run down if everybody would a) give me a chance to get dinner at dinnertime and b) leave me the hell alone and stop looking to me as their own private Ann Landers or whichever one it is that's still alive. But I'm too damned tired to go there.

While Pops takes foreeeeever to get a glass of milk, he and Luke talk about his work, local politics, some firehouse that had to be gutted because rats had taken it over, the Knicks. I eat and silently seethe, two things I'm extremely good at. After about five thousand years, my grandfather finally carts éclair and milk back out into the living room and I realize I have no idea how to get the conversation going again. Or even if I want to.

I get up to put my plate in the dishwasher; Luke says, “He's
right, you look beat. And I'm slime for bein' so caught up in my own crap I didn't stop and think how tired you might be—”

“Oh, please. When have any of us ever been too tired to help each other?”

He gets a funny look on his face. “You sure?”

“No. And if you expect advice, fuggedaboutit.” I dig an éclair out of the box, not bothering with a plate. “But I can listen. And I really want to know why you think Tina wants out.”

The muscles tense in his face. “Because things have been strange between us for a while now.”

“How long?”

“I dunno. Months. A year, maybe.”

I nearly choke. A
year?
How did I miss that?

“Yeah,” he says. “I don't understand it, either, we always got along so good. I mean, you and me, we always fought, got on each other's nerves, right?” Our gazes bounce off each other before he looks away. “But not Tina and me. I mean, the way she'd look at me…like I was her hero, y'know?”

Yeah. I know. Because he was. Because he was the big strong protector and she'd been the damsel in distress for as long as any of us could remember. But it worked both ways, because Tina's wide-eyed worship fed Luke's ego like no other. Nobody had ever needed him the way Tina did, and nobody had ever made her feel as safe as Luke did. In other words, they were the perfect match.

“But now,” he continues, “I dunno, it's like we don't even have anything to say to each other anymore. I come home, we eat dinner, we watch TV, we go to bed. We have sex—occasionally—but I'm not sure why we're bothering, to tell you the truth.” His eyes lift to mine, dark with hurt and confusion. “I'm scared for her, El, that she's gonna fall apart again, like she did that one time in high school. I'm not stupid, I know something's bothering her. But why won't she talk to me?”

In silence, I finish off the éclair, wishing there were about
six more. Both because I need something to keep my mouth occupied and because my mood's just swung dangerously close to self-destructive. I don't know whether it's because I'm tired, or my hormones are being punks, or what, but once again, my reaction surprises me.

It's not that I don't feel for him, or Tina, because I do. My closest friends are both hurting, for godssake. Who else are they gonna come to if not me? Because that's the way it's always been. Except for one time, when I found out I was pregnant with Starr, I've always been the one the other two turned to to fix things between
them.
And up until this moment, I was fine with that, maybe because their needing me made me feel a real part of something. But now…

Now I realize just how long I've actually only been on the outside looking in, living vicariously through somebody else's relationship.

How screwed up is that?

So now, even as my mouth performs its appointed task as Duenna to the Deluded, my brain is desperately trying to scratch out of the kennel I've kept it in for the past twenty-something years. While I've been doing all this repair work for their lives, my own has fallen to rack and ruin.

What the hell does any of this have to do with me?
I want to scream.

But I keep all this under wraps because Luke looks so miserable.

“No comment?” he says.

Great. If I plead the Fifth, he'll take that as a confirmation of his suspicions. If I reassure him Tina never said anything about their marriage being on the rocks, either he'll think I'm lying or he'll start wondering what she did want to talk to me about. Talk about your no-win situation. While all this is rumbling around in my head, however, Luke says, “I just wish I knew what was going on, if she's afraid to talk to me because
of what she went through as a kid, if she can't stand the thought of the marriage failing…”

He yanks out a chair and drops into it, apparently out of steam. But I can tell, it's not Tina who's afraid of the marriage failing. I get a flash of their wedding day, both of them grinning like idiots, Tina as pretty as I've ever seen her in a dress I knocked off from a picture of some six-thousand-dollar number in
Modern Bride.
With the exception of two or three brief separations, they'd been going together for nearly nine years by that point. They were so comfortable together, finishing each other's sentences like an old married couple. Like Luke, I don't get it.

“Hey,” I say lamely. “Everybody goes through rough patches.”

His expression breaks my heart, because he knows this is more than a rough patch. Then he suddenly glances over my shoulder, the worry etched in his brow evaporating in an instant. “Hey, Twink! Your mom said you were asleep.”

My daughter's already in his lap, her skinny arms wrapped around his neck. Next to Leo and me, Luke's her favorite person in the world. And I think I often slip to second place. Maybe third. Not that she doesn't have positive male role models coming out of her ears—my grandfather, the legion of Scardinare males. Even Mickey Gomez, one of the tenants, who's been teaching her Spanish. But her relationship with Luke has always been special, a relationship that's worked both ways. Oh, yeah, Luke's taken his “uncle” duties very seriously, even from before Starr was born.

I let her have her éclair, which I cut into bite-size pieces so most of the chocolate and custard lands in her mouth instead of on her face, thinking saccharine thoughts about not being able to imagine my life without her. Trust me, I don't always feel this way, so I'm going with the moment because it makes me feel good about myself. Like I deserve her.

Luke listens carefully as she prattles on about her day, her yawns getting bigger and bigger as her eyelids droop lower and lower. Finally, chuckling, he stands, Starr clinging to him like a little sedated monkey, and carries her upstairs to put her back to bed. I don't follow, because I know seeing him with her is only going to get my thoughts churning again about his being denied the one thing he really wants.