My Life Next Door (38 page)

Reaching into his pocket, he pulls out a handkerchief and gently dabs her lashes dry. “Grace, sugar, there’s always a way to play it. Have a little faith. I’ve been in this game a while.”

Mom sniffs, her eyes cast down. Jase and I exchange disbelieving looks.
Game?

Clay hooks his thumbs in his pockets, coming around in front of the desk again, starting to pace. “Okay, Grace. What if you call the press conference—
with
the Garretts. You speak first. Confess everything. This terrible thing happened. You were wracked by guilt, but because your daughter and the Garrett boy were personally involved”—he pauses to smile at us, as if bestowing his blessing—“you kept quiet. You didn’t want to taint your daughter’s first true love. Everyone will identify with that—we all had that—and if we didn’t, we sure wish we had. So you kept quiet for the sake of your daughter, but…” He paces a little more, brow puckered. “… you couldn’t honorably represent the people with something of this magnitude on your conscience. This way’s riskier, but I’ve seen it work.
Everybody loves a repentant sinner. You’d have your family there—your daughters standing by their mom. The Garretts, salt-of-the-earth types, the young lovers—”

“Wait just a minute here,” Jase interrupts. “What Sam and I feel about each other isn’t some”—he pauses, searching for words—“
marketing
tool.”

Clay tosses him an amused smile. “With all due respect, son, everyone’s feelings are a marketing tool. That’s what marketing is all about—hitting people in the gut. Here we have the young lovers, the working family struck with an unexpected crisis—” He stops pacing, grins. “Gracie, I’ve got it. You could also use the moment to introduce some new legislation to help working families. Nothing too radical, just something to say Grace Reed has come through this experience with even more compassion for the people she serves. This all makes perfect sense to me now. We could get Mr. Garrett—the wounded blue-collar man—to say he wouldn’t want Senator Reed’s good work to be destroyed by this.”

I look at Jase. His lips are slightly parted and he’s staring at Clay in fascination. Sort of the way you’d look at a striking cobra.

“Then you could appeal to the people, ask them to call or write or send e-mails directly to your office if they still want you as their senator. We in the business call that the ‘Send in Your Box Tops’ speech. People get all het up and excited because they feel part of the process. Your office gets besieged—you lay low for a few days, then call another conference and humbly thank the citizens of Connecticut for their faith in you and
pledge to be worthy of it. It’s a killer moment, and at least fifty percent of the time, it makes you a shoo-in at election time,” he concludes, grinning at Mom triumphantly.

She too is staring at him with her mouth open. “But…” she says.

Jase and I are silent.

“C’mon,” Clay urges. “It makes perfect sense. It’s the logical way to go.”

Jase gets to his feet. I am pleased to notice that he’s taller than Clay. “Everything you say makes sense, sir. I guess it’s logical. But with all due respect, you’re out of your fucking mind. Come on, Sam. Let’s go home.”

Chapter Fifty

The day has dimmed into twilight by the time we leave the house. Jase’s long legs eat up the driveway and I’m nearly jogging to keep up with him. We’ve almost reached the Garretts’ kitchen steps before I come to a standstill. “Wait.”

“Sorry. I was practically towing you along. I feel like I need a shower after all that. Holy hell, Sam. What was that?”

“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry.” How could Clay have said all that, smooth as Kentucky bourbon, and Mom just sitting there as if she’d already drunk the bottle? I rub my forehead. “Sorry,” I mutter again.

“It’d be good if you’d stop apologizing right about now,” he tells me.

I take a deep breath, looking down at his shoes. “It’s about all I’ve got. To fix things.”

Jase has these huge feet. They dwarf mine. He’s wearing his usual sneakers, and I’m in flip-flops. We stand toe to toe for a minute, then he edges one big foot in between my smaller ones.

“You were great back there,” I say, hanging on to what’s true.

He jams his hands in his pockets. “Are you kidding? You were the one who called him on his bullshit every time I
started to get hypnotized by his wrong-is-right, up-is-down arguments.”

“Only because I’d heard ’em all before. It took me weeks to see through the hypnotism.”

Jase shakes his head. “Suddenly the whole thing was a photo op. How’d he even do that? I get why Tim was so mental about that guy.”

We’re quiet, looking back at my house.

“My mother,” I start, then stop. Despite what Clay says, that I’m a casual turncoat daughter, this isn’t easy. How can Jase ever know, really understand, all those years when she did teach us well? Or the best she could.

But he waits, patient and thoughtful, until I can say more.

“She’s not a monster. I want you to know that. It doesn’t really matter because what she did was so wrong. But she’s not an evil person. Just”—my voice wobbles—“not all that strong.”

Jase reaches out, pulls the elastic band from my hair, letting it slip free over my shoulders. I’ve missed that gesture so much.

I didn’t look over at Mom when we walked out. No point to it. Even before, when I
did
look at her face, I had no idea what to read there. “I’m guessing Mom won’t want me showing up for dinner at the B and T tonight. Or when I’ll be welcome at home.”

“Well, you’re welcome in mine.” He draws me in close, hipbone to hipbone. “We can just listen to that suggestion of George’s. You can move into my room, sleep in my bed. I thought that was a brilliant idea the minute he came up with it.”

“George just mentioned the room, not the bed,” I say.

“He did tell you I never peed in my bed. That was incentive right there.”

“There are those of us who would take clean sheets as a given. We might need
more
incentive.”

“I’ll see what I can do,” Jase says.

“Sailor Supergirl!” George shouts through the screen. “I’m going to have a baby brother! Or a sister, but I want a brother. We have a picture. Come see, come see, come see!”

I turn to Jase. “It’s confirmed, then?”

“Alice shook it out of Mom with her ninja nurse tactics. Kind of like Tim with you, I guess.”

George returns to the screen, squashing some printout against it. “See. This is my baby brother. He kinda looks like a storm cloud now, but he’s gonna change a lot because that’s what Mommy says babies do best of anything..”

Jase says, “Stand back, buddy,” nudging the door open wide enough for us to pass through.

I haven’t seen Joel for a while. Where he once projected all laidback cool, now he’s edgy, stalking around the kitchen. Alice churns out pancakes and the younger kids sit at the table, watching as if their older siblings are Nickelodeon.

We walk in just as Joel’s asking, “Why does Dad have that thing in his windpipe? He was breathing fine. Are we going backward?”

Alice edges a small, flat, very dark pancake off the pan. “The nurses explained all this.”

“Not in English. Please, Al, translate?”

“It’s because of the deep vein thrombosis—kind of a clot he got. They put him in those inflatable boots for that, because they didn’t want to give him anti-coag drugs—”

“English,”
Joel reiterates.

“Stuff that makes his blood thinner. Because of the head injury. They put him in the boots, but someone ignored or didn’t notice the order that they were to go on and off every two hours.”

“Can we sue this someone?” Joel asks angrily. “He was talking, getting better, now he’s worse off than ever.”

Alice chips four more skinny charcoal briquette-looking pancakes off the pan, then adds some butter. “It’s good they caught it, Joey.” She looks up, seeming to notice for the first time that I’m standing beside Jase.

“What are
you
doing here?”

“She belongs here,” Jase says. “Drop it, Alice.”

Andy starts to cry. “He doesn’t look like Dad anymore.”

“He does so. Look like Dad,” George insists stoutly. He hands me the computer printout. “This is our baby.”

“He’s very cute,” I tell George, scrutinizing what does, indeed, look like a hurricane off the Bahamas.

“Dad’s all skinny,” Andy continues. “He smells like the hospital. Looking at him freaks me out. It’s like he’s this old man suddenly? I don’t want an old man. I want Daddy.”

Jase winks at her. “He just needs more of Alice’s pancakes, Ands. He’ll be fine then.”

“Alice makes the worst pancakes known to humankind,” Joel observes. “These are like coasters.”

“
I’m
cooking,” Alice observes sharply. “You’re what? Critiquing? Doing a restaurant review? Go get takeout, if you want to be useful. Ass-hat.”

Jase glances around at his siblings, then back at me. I understand his hesitation. Though things at the Garretts’ are unbalanced—mealtimes off, everyone more cranky, it all still
seems normal. Not right to detonate the bomb of some big announcement. Like barging into Mr. and Mrs. Capulet’s argument about whether they are overpaying the nurse with
“We now interrupt this ordinary life with an epic tragedy.”

“Yo.” The screen door opens, letting in Tim, laden with four pizza boxes, two cartons of ice cream, and the blue-zipped bag in which the Garretts keep the contents of the till from the hardware store balanced on top.

“Hello, hot Alice. Wanna put on your uniform and check my pulse?”

“I never play games with little boys,” Alice snaps without turning around from her position at the stove, where she’s still doggedly turning out pancakes.

“You should. We’re full of energy. And mischief.”

Alice doesn’t bother to answer.

Taking the boxes, Jase begins piling them on the table, batting away his younger siblings’ questing hands. “Wait till I get plates, guys! Jeez. How was the take at the end of the day?”

“Actually, surprisingly good.” Tim hauls a wad of paper napkins out of his pocket and fans them out on the table. “We sold a wood chipper—that freaking big one in the back that was taking up all the space.”

“No way.” Jase pulls a gallon of milk out of the fridge, carefully distributing it into paper cups.

“Two-thousand-dollar way.” Tim flips slices of pizza onto plates, shoving them in front of Duff, Harry, Andy, George, and the still-scowling Joel.

“Hey, kid. Good to see you here.” Tim smiles at me. “Back where you belong, and all that crap.”

“Mines!” Patsy shouts, pointing at Tim. He goes to her, rumples her scanty hair.

“See, hot Alice? Even the very young feel the pull of my magnetism. It’s like an irresistible urge, a force like gravity, or—”

“Poop!”

“Or that.” Tim removes Patsy’s hand, which is now tugging up his shirt. Poor girl. She really hates drinking from bottles.

He grins at Alice. “So, hot Alice. Whaddya think? How about putting on that uniform and checking my reflexes?”

“Stop putting the moves on my sister in our kitchen, Tim. Jesus. Just so you know, Alice’s nurse’s uniform is a pair of green scrubs. She looks like Gumby,” Jase says, returning the gallon of milk to the fridge.

“I’m starving, but I don’t want pizza,” Duff says heavily. “That’s all we ever eat anymore. I’m sick of pizza
and
Cheerios, and those used to be my two favorite things on the planet.”

“I used to think it would be fun to watch TV all the time,” Harry says. “But it’s not, it’s boring.”

“I stayed up until three last night, watching Jake Gyllenhaal movies, even the R-rated ones,” Andy offers. “Nobody even noticed or told me to go to bed.”

“Are we all sharing grievances now?” Joel says. “Should I get out the talking stick?”

“Well, actually,” Jase begins, and then there’s a knock on the door.

“Joel, did you order out even though you
knew
I was making pancakes?” Alice asks angrily.

Joel raises his hands in self-defense. “God knows I wanted to, but I hadn’t gotten around to it. I swear.”

The knock sounds again, and Duff opens the screen door to let in…my mother.

“I wondered if my daughter was here.” Her gaze drifts over everyone at the table, Patsy with her hair smeared with butter, syrup, and tomato sauce; George without his shirt, little rivulets of syrup edging down his chest; Harry lunging for more pizza; Duff at his most truculent, the teary Andy. Jase, who freezes in his tracks.

“Hi, Mom.”

Her eyes settle on me. “I thought I’d find you here. Hi, sweetheart.”

“Yo Gracie.” Tim drags an armchair from the living room to the kitchen island. “Take a load off. Let your hair down. Have a slice.” He cuts a glance at my face, then Jase’s, eyebrows lifting.

Jase is still staring at Mom, that confused look he had in her office returning. My mother regards the boxes of pizza as though they are alien artifacts from Roswell, New Mexico. Her preferred pizza toppings, I know, are pesto, artichoke hearts, and shrimp. Nonetheless, she sinks into the chair. “Thank you.”

I look at her. This is neither the broken woman in the silk robe nor the brittle hostess offering Jase a beer. There’s something in her face I haven’t seen before. I glance over to find Jase still studying her too, his expression impassive.

“So, you’re Sailor Supergirl’s mommy.” George struggles to talk around a mouth full of pizza. “We never saw you up close before. Only on TV.”

My mother gives him a tiny smile. “What’s your name?”

I rush through introductions. She looks so stiff
and uncomfortable, immaculate and out of place in the comfortable chaos of this kitchen. “Should we go home, Mom?”

She shakes her head. “No. I’d like to meet Jase’s family. Goodness. Is this all of you?”

“’Cept my daddy, cause he’s in the hostible,” George says chattily, getting up from the table and circling over to Mom. “And Mommy, cause she’s taking a nap. And our new baby, because he’s in Mommy’s belly drinking her blood.”

Mom pales.

Rolling her eyes, Alice says, “George, that’s not how it works. I explained when you asked how the new baby ate. Nutrients go through the umbilical cord, along with Mom’s blood, so—”