Promise Me A Rainbow (32 page)
Read Promise Me A Rainbow Online
Authors: Cheryl Reavi
“You can sit here,” Fritz said, offering her the lower part of the lounge.
“I don’t want to catch what
you’ve
got,” she said, and she continued to stand.
Michael was trying not to grin. “So what do you think the other one’s up to?”
“With my luck,” Joe said, “he ran off on his lunch break and got married.” He picked up the telephone and looked up two numbers.
“Daddy, what are you doing!” Della cried when he started to dial. “You’re not going to tell on Sharon and Tessa—”
“You watch me, kid.”
“Daddy, you
can’t
! Everybody does it!”
“Yes, I can. It’s part of the parents’ cooperative, Della—sort of like a neighborhood watch. We stick together so our kids can’t jerk us around. I know both their parents, and I can tell you right now, everybody is about to get their butts busted.”
“It’s no big deal. If it was Charlie, you wouldn’t say anything!”
“I’d say plenty, and you know it. The
deal
here is you weren’t where you were supposed to be. I didn’t give you permission to hang out instead of going to school. While we’re at it, Charlie’s an
A
student. He can afford to miss a day’s classes a lot more than you can. Now sit down!”
“Daddy, don’t! I’ve never done it before!”
He stopped dialing. “And if you haven’t, we both know why you’re doing it now, don’t we?”
She flushed and looked away.
“Well, you wanted my attention, so now you’ve got it. Let’s hear it.”
“I don’t know what you mean—”
“I
mean
, Della, that I know you’re doing this because you don’t want me to see Catherine. The thing I don’t know is why. What have you got against her? You know, I could understand it if she was some kind of bimbo I’d picked up in a bar someplace. But she isn’t. She’s a nice woman.”
“I don’t like her—”
“You don’t even know her! You don’t know anything about her—”
“I know I don’t want her to be my mother!”
“She doesn’t want to be your mother!”
“Have you
asked
her?”
“No, I haven’t asked her.”
“Then how do you know? How do you know what a woman like that wants?”
Margaret
, he thought suddenly. He wasn’t talking to Della. He was talking to Margaret. Della was parroting
her
words.
He worked hard to hang on to his temper. “Well, you’re just going to have to get used to it. I like Catherine. I don’t intend to stop seeing her.”
He glanced in Fritz’s direction. Poor, worried little Fritz.
“Michael, I’m going to go on home,” he said to his brother. “I’m even going to take my kids with me.”
“Joey, Joey,” he said, coming to help him pack Fritz up again. “Hey,” he said quietly as they walked to the truck. “Don’t look so grim. It’ll all work out.”
“Yeah? You think any woman is going to want to take on
this
?”
“Nah, not any woman. Catherine, maybe.” He patted him on the back. “Don’t worry about the business. I can handle it. You get Della straightened out.”
I would if it wasn’t for your wife
, he almost said. God, his head was killing him.
He sent Della ahead in her own car, instructing her to pick up Charlie at school and then get the both of them back to the house without delay. He intended to have a family meeting and settle things once and for all. When he arrived home, he put Fritz to bed on the couch, took some aspirin for his headache, called Catherine and got no answer, and ran into Charlie in the kitchen.
“What the hell are you doing here?” Joe said.
“I live here?” he suggested.
“Don’t be cute! How did you get home?”
“Well, I heard about Della going over the wall—see what you started, Fritz?” he called into the living room. “So I figured she’d be ‘delayed,’ as we say in truant teenage circles. So I got a ride with Chip and the guys.”
“So where is Della?”
“Don’t know, Pop.”
Charlie are you sure
you don’t know where she is?” he asked him nearly an hour later.
“Pop, honest. I don’t know.”
He didn’t know. Nobody knew. She didn’t come home.
“You just missed him,” Pat said.
“Who?”
“Joe D’Amaro. You know, the Filthy Beast.”
Catherine stood there, trying not to acknowledge her acute disappointment so she wouldn’t have to deal with it. Since Sunday she’d had to make do with two hurried telephone calls—the first one to let her know that Fritz was better and the second one after Treasure Higgins’s funeral, when she had been emotionally exhausted because of the terrible sadness that surrounded the baby’s death and because Sasha had suddenly decided that she wanted the “memory envelope” with the lock of Treasure’s hair and the identification bracelet and the copy of her footprints the hospital had offered her before she had gone home.
Knowing that they were kept on file in the likely event that a mother changed her mind, Catherine had gone to the hospital to get it, only to find that Treasure Higgins’ envelope had been misfiled. No one could locate it, and Catherine had to return to Sasha empty-handed when she wanted nothing more than to be able to give her this small comfort.
At best, Joe, too, had seemed distracted, lapsing into a silence that Catherine could neither fill nor bring herself to ask about. Now, on Friday, he’d finally come by to see her.
She’d missed him.
“Did he say anything?” she asked a lot more casually than she felt.
“Only that he couldn’t wait. He looked pretty harassed.”
“Harassed?” Catherine repeated, because that was precisely the way he’d sounded on the phone.
“Yeah, you know. The way you’d look if the hem of your dress was caught in a paper shredder.”
“He didn’t say
anything
?”
“Just where were you. I said you were in a meeting. He said he couldn’t wait. End of conversation.”
She could feel Pat looking at her.
“So,” Pat said, “what’s this with your face? I thought you were seeing him.”
“I am—or I was.”
“Is there trouble in paradise or what?”
“I don’t know.”
“Hadn’t you ought to find out?”
“How am I supposed to do that? I can’t catch up with him long enough,” she said irritably, because of how badly she wanted to know why she hadn’t seen him.
“Ever hear of
the phone
?”
“I can’t tell anything on the phone.”
“So write him a letter.”
Pat was being cute, but Catherine was nearly desperate enough to do that. Or to go see him at the construction site. If Fritz was all right, it must be something else, something with the business or some part of his life she didn’t know anything about. She
hated
trying to second-guess his behavior, particularly when it always led to the same conclusion—that their brief interlude was over. She wished he’d extend the same courtesy he’d asked of her—if he wanted her to take a hike, she wished he’d just say it.
“So how are you feeling?” she asked Pat abruptly, because Pat was more unkempt than usual. Her clothes were wrinkled and her hair needed to be washed.
“Who, me? I feel like hell is full and the dead are walking on earth, Ms. Holben.” She gave a sarcastic smile. “You know, I still think it’s got something to do with trying to kill the cancer and not killing me in the process. But . . . onward and upward, as they say.”
“That’s not what I mean, and you know it. We haven’t talked lately—”
“You mean
I
haven’t talked. All you do is listen.” She sighed. “No, we haven’t ‘talked’—since you fell in
love
.”
Catherine pursed her lips to say that she wasn’t in love, but she didn’t say it. Perhaps she was. She was at least in like. She was most assuredly in lust. She was familiar with Pat’s moods by now. She waited for her to get her sarcasm out of the way.
“It’s Don,” Pat said after a moment.
“What about him?”
“You’ll laugh.”
“I won’t laugh. What about him?”
“He . . . thinks he may want to put the bimbo on hold and come back to me.” Pat looked into Catherine’s eyes, then looked away. “You’re not laughing.”
“You’re not, either.” Catherine countered.
“That’s because I know why he’s doing it. Do you know why?”
“No,” Catherine said truthfully.
“You want to know?”
“Yes.”
Pat laughed. “Yes? Now you’ve done it. I’m not prepared for anything so direct as
yes
. I thought you’d play Twenty Questions out of your Psychology 101 book with me. You know, I say, ‘Do you want to know?’ and you say, ‘Do you want to tell me?’ Until I get tired of trying to spill my guts and forget about the whole thing, or if I don’t, you won’t have to take the responsibility for prying it out of me.”
“Pat—” Catherine began, but Pat held up both hands to stop her.
“I’ll cut the bull. It’s this. If Don goes through with the divorce, the house goes to me. He wants to be sure he gets it when I die—he doesn’t want the divorce final before then—or if it is, he wants to make sure I don’t leave it to somebody else,” she said in a rush, as if she didn’t hurry and say it, she wouldn’t be able to.
“Why do you think that?”
“Aha! There it is. The Psych 101 question. I knew you had one someplace. I think it, Catherine, because it’s true. I’ve even run a little test—he’s not very bright, you know. He can’t see through womanly wiles at all—even mine. It goes like this. Every time I make him think I can get along without him, he starts making coming-home noises. I know what he wants. Oh, I’ve shocked you, Catherine.”
“You don’t
know
what he wants, Pat,” Catherine said, but she was shocked. Pat was seriously ill. She shouldn’t have to play these mind games with a greedy, errant husband.
“Oh, yes, I do. I’ve known him since he was a nineteen-year-old boy soldier. He doesn’t want
me
—he just wants everything I’ve got. For
her
. The man is vile. The worst kind of—” She broke off then and gave a sad smile. “If you’re going to play psychologist, Catherine, you’re going to have to learn to do something about your face.”
“I’m not playing psychologist. I’m listening to you.”
“Yeah, but I know what you’re thinking. You’re thinking,
how
could a woman like me get herself all tangled up with a son of a bitch like Don Bauer? Now that’s where life will screw you, Catherine. You really have to be careful. See, he wasn’t
always
a son of a bitch. When I first met him, he wasn’t the way he is now—I swear,” she said, holding up her right hand. “I’m a smart woman, educated, not too ugly. You think I could love a jerk like he is now? He just . . . changed somehow. Maybe it was his war experiences. Maybe it’s the bimbo . . .”—she gave a short laugh—“ . . . or maybe it’s me. I took a good man and turned him into a piece of shit.”