Making It Last - A Novella (Camelot Series) (5 page)

“Are you having an affair?” she asked.

“What?
No
. Jesus. I was at work.”

“You work until ten?”

“I work until eight and then haul ass all the way back here from Chillicothe, yeah.” Tony flipped on the light over the stove.

“Why are you doing a job in Chillicothe?”

“Because that’s where there
is
a job. Why are you sneaking around my house and accusing me of cheating on my wife?”

“Somebody has to. There’s lasagna on the top shelf.”

“Somebody has to what?” Tony took the pan out and slid it onto the countertop. It made a slightly louder bang than it needed to.

He was angrier than he needed to be.

Or, no. He was the right amount of angry. His mother-in-law had accused him of cheating
on Amber. He was allowed to feel like yelling, to bang the lasagna pan around. He just wasn’t allowed to blow up.

It had been one of those days when he’d spent hours not blowing up.

“Somebody has to tell you when you’re being stupid. If your mother were still alive, she would do it, but she’s not, so it falls to me.”

The nerve of this woman. Forever sticking her nose in other people’s business. Tony peeled the foil off the lasagna, got out a fork, and stabbed a bite right out of the pan.

“It’s cold,” she said.

“I know that.”

When he put it in his mouth, she pulled the lasagna pan across the island to her and found a spatula. She measured out a serving, then looked at it and cut and added another sliver before putting the plate in the microwave and setting the timer.

As if he couldn’t microwave his own lasagna if he wanted to, or manage his own life. He’d just spent seventeen hours managing other people’s shit.

He did that, day in and day out, every single day—handled his employees, hassled the subs to do what they said they’d do when they said they’d do it, massaged the owners’ egos, coaxed information out of incompetent architects who’d already moved on to the next thing.

And still at least once a week, he found himself on the receiving end of somebody’s hissy fit about something. He took the blame whenever anything was late or slow or not up to spec, even when it wasn’t his fault, because he was in charge, and that made everything his fault.

Tony was used to taking blame. Used to getting angry and keeping all the evidence locked up tight where nobody could see it.

But he didn’t usually have to do it in his own kitchen at ten o’clock at night when he was exhausted.

“I’m stupid,” he said flatly.

“Of course you’re stupid. You left my daughter in Jamaica.”

Tony managed not to throw his hands up in the air. Barely. “I thought it was your idea.”

“My idea was for you
both
to stay. It’s no good if she’s there and you’re here. How are you going to fix anything that way?”

“Fix what?”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. How should I know what? Whatever it is you did to make her
cry.”

Tony scrubbed his hands over his face again. It really wouldn’t be smart to get in a fight with his mother-in-law at the end of a long day that she’d spent at his house, taking care of his kids. He owed her his gratitude, not his anger.

But goddamn, he wanted to blame her for what a shitty day he’d had. He needed to blame someone other than himself for the mental brick he tripped over every time he thought about Amber in Jamaica.

Every time he asked himself,
What if she doesn’t come back?

The microwave beeped. Janet took the plate and a fork to the kitchen table and pulled out a chair.

Tony followed her. Sat in the chair she’d pulled out.

Leave it to Janet to both mother him and remind him he no longer had a mother. Coming up on a year since his own mom died of breast cancer, most people still danced around the subject. Nobody seemed to want to talk about her, and that was the part he couldn’t stand, because while she hadn’t been a perfect mother, she’d always been
there
, at the center of the Mazzara whirlwind.

Now that she was gone, it was like she’d never existed, except that without her, there wasn’t anything pulling his siblings toward one another. They were all moving off in different directions, and Tony didn’t know how to slow them down or pull them back.

Patrick most of all. Patrick wasn’t working. He didn’t talk to his friends. Didn’t have a girlfriend.

Patrick wouldn’t speak to him.

Tony woke up sometimes in the middle of the night to the echo of his father’s voice.
You never pay attention, Anthony. It’s gonna get you into trouble someday
.

Worse, he heard himself saying it to his own son. Ant was easily distracted—body always restless, head in the clouds—and Tony had to lock his jaw sometimes in order to keep from repeating the words that his father had drilled into him.

Pay more attention
.

Don’t be so careless
.

You’re going to get hurt
.

He ducked his head and ate. He’d skipped lunch and ignored his own hunger all
afternoon. When he climbed into the truck to drive home, he’d started thinking about all the shit that was going wrong, worrying over what else he might have missed, what he could do different, and his stomach had tied itself in a knot.

He ate mechanically now, chewing until he knew he could swallow, swallowing past his reluctance to bother. The food sat heavy in his gut. His heart was a rock in his chest, too much weight to keep carrying around, but when he tried to put it down, to sleep, he just thought of another hundred things he had to do to keep his kids safe and happy, fed and clothed and never wanting for anything.

After he finished the last bite and drank a glass of water, he asked, “The boys all okay?”

“Anthony got detention.”

“What did he do?”

“He mouthed off to his teacher and got out of his chair too much when he was supposed to be doing homework.”

Ant and detention were well acquainted. His pediatrician had been pushing Focalin last time Amber took him in for a physical. They’d decided to wait and see.

“Jake?”

“He cried when we dropped him off at school, but not before bed.”

“Did he go to sleep all right?”

“It took him a while.”

“A while” probably meant hours, because there was no such thing as an easy bedtime with Jake. He would be tired in the morning.

“Clark say anything?”

“Not a word.”

The news settled into his spine, pressing him down into the chair.

“You need to go to her.”

As if that were a thing he could just do. “You have any idea what that would cost?”

“Jamila would pay for it if you asked.”

“I’m not asking.”

“Is your pride so much more important than your marriage?”

“It’s not that.” He looked past her, through the living room of the house he’d built for his missing wife. Toward the winding staircase that led up to his boys’ rooms and his own empty
bed. “I’ve got work, and I can’t leave the kids. They’re scared.”

“They’re afraid she’s not coming home.”

“They shouldn’t be.”

Janet shook her head. “Yes, they should. So should you.”

She looked right at him, challenging, and Tony dropped the reins on his temper.

“Don’t tell me what I should be afraid of. You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I know my daughter.”

“She’s my
wife
,” Tony said. “I think I know her pretty well.”

Janet pushed her chair back abruptly, its wooden legs moaning over the tile. “Then why don’t you see what’s happening? You’re losing her. She’s lost.”

“She’s in fucking Negril, Janet, not on the moon.”

“That’s not what I mean, and you know it.”

Tony stood, crossing his arms, wishing he could deny that he did. He
did
know it.

Amber was getting smaller. Taking up less and less space inside the house, inside herself.

It had gotten worse since the fall, when Jake started first grade. She was still there—still in the kitchen handing him his lunch when he left for work in the morning. Still in the bed, wearing her pajamas, reading a book when he crawled in next to her. She asked him how his day had gone. She told him what the kids were up to. But she wasn’t
there
.

Some nights he pulled into the driveway and the house was so big and so dark that he thought,
I’m never going to find her
. As though their home were full of water, a sinking ocean liner, and Tony had to wade through the cold weight of it, looking for his sinking, silent wife. His heart would kick into gear with a jolt of adrenaline, but then the worst part—he’d realize there was nothing he
could
do, because he was just sitting in the truck in the dark garage, wondering what the fuck was wrong with him.

How did you bring somebody back who wasn’t really gone?

“I can’t go to Jamaica,” he said. “I’ll get fired off this job I’m doing in Dublin.”

“So you lose the job. Isn’t Amber more important?”

Tony’s fists clenched.

That she could even ask him. That it was possible for her to not
know
.

Did she think he worked the way he did for his own amusement? That he’d driven to Chillicothe before the sun was up to supervise the concrete pour on a lark, because it was such a
joy?

He did it for Amber. For their kids. All of it.

He was short on cash. Amber didn’t know it, but if the owner of the Dublin house didn’t write him a check soon soon, Tony wasn’t going to be able to pay the mortgage on time. If he lost this job, he wouldn’t be able to pay it at all—not without taking out a loan or selling something—and he would have to make the decision he’d been trying not to make since Patrick quit.

Sell his house or give up Mazzara Homes—give up building houses completely.

In this economy, everybody was bidding low, pinching pennies, and only the commercial work—Mazzara Construction, their starter company, his father’s company—had a decent margin. It was soul-crushing, but it paid.

He couldn’t sell this house. He’d built it for Amber. When he thought of her, it was always here, in these rooms where she’d picked out the paint and the trim and the countertops.

What would they have if they lost the house? How would he be able to find her?

Tony shook his head. “It’s just … we’re hanging on by a thread, and I can’t go
anywhere
, you understand? I have to fix things from here.”

Janet pursed her lips. “You don’t get it.”

“What don’t I get?”

But she didn’t tell him. She picked up his plate, put it in the sink, and ran water over it. Scrubbed it clean.

He wished she would tell him what to do.

He wished somebody would.

Because he was doing everything he could think of, and it wasn’t enough.

* * *

Tony couldn’t sleep. He went through the whole ritual—shower, boring book, counting backward from a hundred. But without Amber’s body next to him in the bed, he had no counterweight against the remorseless slide of worry.

He unpacked the rosary of his fears, moving from one bead to the next and back around to the beginning in a pointless litany. Amber. Clark. Anthony. Jacob. Patrick. The mortgage. The
company. His argument with Janet.

He wondered what his wife was doing. If she was asleep. If she’d had a good day.

At lunchtime, he’d sent her an updated itinerary, and she’d texted him.

Tx
.

In the dark, by himself, he couldn’t pretend not to hate that reply, or to feel anything generous about the reprieve he’d offered her. Yes, she deserved a few days away from taking care of him and the children.

He didn’t care. He wanted her home.

He wanted her here, with him, where he could smell her and touch her, spoon around her and keep his mind on her, with her. He’d learned a long time ago that the key to sleep was to fill himself up with Amber, and in the empty bed he got hard thinking of all the things he wanted to do to her. How he would grip her hips if she were here, lick right up the middle of her pussy. Make her moan and push at his head.
Yes, Tony. Oh, don’t. Don’t stop. Don’t
.

Cupping his dick in his palm, he thought,
Maybe I’ll sleep if I just …
but it only made him angry to hear his hand working himself over, and he gave it up, disgusted.

He thought of the taste of his wife and tried to remember the last time they’d had sex. If she’d made any noise at all.

He put a rerun of
Friday Night Lights
on. Turned it off and pressed his face into the pillow and wished he had a button so he could turn his head off.

Eventually, he must have slept, because he woke suddenly to the knowledge of someone standing beside the bed. Clark.

“You okay, buddy?”

Clark didn’t answer.

Tony remembered that he wasn’t speaking.

He sat up and reached for his water glass. This could take some time. There had been nights when Clark was a toddler that he’d come to their room, padding on silent feet, and stand there until they figured out what he needed.

Did your Pull-Ups leak? Did your blankets come off? Do you need a song? A story? Was it a bad dream? Tell us what you need, baby
.

Clark didn’t like to do that. He liked for them to know.

He punished them for not knowing by making them guess.

Tony swung his legs over the side of the bed and checked the clock. Three-fifteen. Up for the day, then, and he’d only slept about an hour.

This is what it will be like if she doesn’t come back
.

Night after night like this
.

This is what it will be like forever
.

His throat hurt, so he drank the water.

“You want to sit?”

Clark sat.

Tony tried to think what to ask his son, what to say. He wasn’t at the top of his game. That death-knell kept echoing in his head.

This is what it will be like
.

The dark was so
dark
without her.

Clark whispered, “Are you and Mom getting a divorce?”

The question landed in Tony’s lap, and he held the softness of it in his hands, trying to figure out how to shape the right answer.