Promise Me A Rainbow (9 page)

She made no effort at small talk: how long he had lived in Wilmington, because his accent wasn’t North Carolinian, or how many children he had, because she already knew. She dumped the apples onto the kitchen table.

“Would you like an apple, Mr. D’Amaro?” she asked instead. This time he was looking at the cabinet of Blue Willow dishes.

“Yeah, it’s a long time until dinner,” he answered, again without hesitation. Clearly, he was a man who also didn’t vacillate.

She tossed him one of the largest. “Do you want a knife to peel it?”

“No,” he said, walking to the sink and washing it off briefly under the tap. “This is a great place,” he said, looking at the ceiling again. “Really built to last. Me—I’d rather restore a building like this than throw up a hundred of those condos on the beachfront.” He took a bite of the apple. “It makes my brother crazy.”

“I can imagine,” Catherine said. “Money’s money. And there can’t be much of it in restorations.” She got an apple of her own, and she was readjusting her thinking about Joseph D’Amaro. She still thought he was impatient and volatile, and she also thought he would deliberately keep himself distant from strangers like her. She was surprised at his revelation about his building preference and his brother’s response to it. Strange, she thought, that he had such admiration for the building, a building Jonathan had such disgust for. She washed the apple at the sink as he had done and, when she turned around, she found Joe D’Amaro looking at her intently, making assessments of his own.

You don’t give a damn about money, Joe almost said, and it occurred to him suddenly that he had no idea where that notion had come from. He didn’t know this woman, even if his years in the PTA did tell him she couldn’t be doing whatever she was doing with a bunch of pregnant girls in tow for the salary. But then, maybe she couldn’t find anything else, and she was just marking time until she could get a better job. She could be like Michael’s wife, Margaret. She could have kept Jonathan hopping to get her everything she wanted until Jonathan decided to keep the Mercedes-Benz and dump her—if he’d dumped her.

No, he’d dumped her all right. Joe could see it when he looked into her eyes. There was a kind of lost and sad look there, something he recognized because he’d seen it in his own eyes after Lisa died. It must not matter
why
the other person left, he thought suddenly—only that they were gone.

He pulled out one of the kitchen chairs and sat down, watching while she jerked the cord on the ceiling fan over the table and put away the rest of her groceries. The air from the fan felt good, and he took another bite of the apple and waited, fighting down the urge to hurry her along. She moved to the double kitchen windows, opening both of them. He could hear the wind in the willow oaks outside and the traffic from the street below. He wanted to tell her that the room would stay cooler if she left the windows closed, but he kept it to himself. Some people wanted fresh air more than they wanted to stay cool.

“About Fritz,” he said because he didn’t want to wait any longer.

“Is Lisa your wife?” Catherine asked, to be certain she understood Fritz’s remarks.

He frowned. “She was,” he said carefully. It hadn’t occurred to him that Catherine Holben might know anything about Lisa. Jesus, what had Fritz told this woman?

“She died,” Catherine went on. “And she was Fritz’s mother.” It wasn’t a question.

He stood up, looking for a place to throw the half-eaten apple. “Yes. And I don’t talk about her. To anybody. Could we just get on with this? I want to know what Fritz said to you. That’s all.”

“Under the sink,” she said because he was still holding the apple. “Do you know why Fritz calls you Joe?”

“What the hell has that got to do with anything?” he snapped. Earlier he’d come close to admiring the straight forwardness in this woman, but now it was beginning to get on his nerves. And with that question she’d stepped squarely on the thing that had nagged at him for the past two years, when he’d suddenly ceased to be Daddy and he’d become the somber Joe.

He was afraid suddenly. He hadn’t loved Fritz the way he should have, and he didn’t want to hear that she had suffered for it. Love begat love. Maybe Fritz didn’t love him now. Maybe he’d ruined it, and that quiet, gentle girl of his didn’t give a damn about him. He tossed the apple into the garbage can under the sink.

“Do you know?” Catherine persisted.

“No. She just does. She started it when she was about five. Look, are you going to tell me what she said to you or am I wasting my time?”

“She said she calls you Joe so you won’t die.”

He gave her a stricken look, and Catherine was certain now. He was not nearly so unaffected by the problems in his life as he wanted her to think. His lips pursed, as if he were going to say something, but he didn’t say it. He walked across to the double windows instead, looking down at the traffic below.

Catherine waited, watching him draw a deep breath.

“Before we moved here,” he said finally, “Fritz’s grandmother—Lisa’s mother—lived with us for a while I . . . always assumed she did it because that’s what she heard her grandmother call me all the time.” He looked around at her. “But you don’t think that, do you?”

“No.”

“What are you, some kind of expert on kids?”

“I’ve worked with a lot of children and—”

“Worked with,” he said, interrupting. “But you don’t have any of your own.”

He remembered her argument with Jonathan. What had she said? “Until you made my having a baby a condition of the marriage?” She must be one of those career women, then, who didn’t give a damn about having children. She was crazy if she thought she was going to tell him what he should be doing with his.

They stared at each other across the room.

“No, Mr. D’Amaro,” she said quietly. “I don’t have children of my own. You know, this is the second time I’ve had this same conversation today, and I’m getting tired of it. I am not a mother, but I know a lot about children and I think Fritz—”

“Maybe I don’t want to hear what you think, Ms. Holben. I don’t need your criticism about the way I raise my kids. And just what makes you such an authority?”

“I’m not an authority. Nobody is. And this has gone far enough. I don’t like to be jerked around, Mr. D’Amaro. Particularly in my own home.
You
came to
me
. You asked me about Fritz, and I’m trying to tell you. I don’t know what it is about this situation that makes you so defensive. I really don’t care. But whatever it is that’s giving you all this guilt, you’re not taking it out on me.”

“You think
I’m
guilty? Great! It’s not enough for you to psychoanalyze Fritz—you want to take a stab at me, too. What is it with you? You don’t even know me.”

She looked him directly in the eye. “I know you’re making a big effort to find out what’s bothering your child—on the surface. But you don’t really want to know. You’re worried about her, but you want to hear me say all little girls go around calling their father’s by their first name so they won’t die. You want the status quo because anything else is inconvenient. Life is full of inconveniences, Mr. D’Amaro, and I’m sure Fritz would have gotten around to telling you she’s scared you’re going to die like her mother did—instead of telling a total stranger. Oh, but I forgot. You’re not home much, and Della’s only interested in parties and clothes, and Charlie stays glued to the computer.”

“I don’t have time for this,” he said impatiently, heading toward the front door. “Don’t think I don’t appreciate it, Ms. Holben.”

He caught a glimpse of the gnomes on the coffee table as he passed through the living room, and the great weight around his heart grew heavier still.

Jesus, Lisa! Why did you leave me with this?

He jerked the door open and let it slam after him, but he knew before he reached the bottom of the stairs what he was going to have to do. He stood in the foyer by the mailboxes, trying to put his anger aside. He was always angry these days. It was stupid and he knew it, but he still let it overwhelm him.

He started to go back up the stairs, but the old woman behind the screen door stood watching. He went out the front doors instead, leaving his handprint on the beveled glass.

Catherine watched him from the living-room window, looking down on him with a bird’s-eye view as he walked across the street to that same battered truck with the wheelbarrow in the back she’d seen earlier.

Way to go, Holben
, she thought. For someone who was supposed to be reasonably skilled in handling people, she’d done a remarkably poor job of it today. First Maria, and now Joe D’Amaro—when she knew better. In both instances, she had reacted to their behavior and not looked at the cause of it.

“I’m too tired to look for causes,” she said aloud. “I’ve got troubles of my own.”

Joe D’Amaro looked up as he got into the truck, and she moved away from the window. Tired or not, she had been concerned about Fritz, and she hadn’t been much help to her—except to put her father more on the defensive than he already was. She sighed heavily. This was exactly what she did
not
need.

She went back into the kitchen, her still bare feet padding across the wooden floor. Perhaps Joe D’Amaro would have found her a little more credible if she’d put her shoes on. She stood for a moment in front of the sink, replaying in her mind what she should have said and done.

But it was too late. She had missed her chance because she was tired and because Joe D’Amaro was defensive—and little Fritz wound up getting the short end of the stick.

She roamed around the apartment, gathering up dirty laundry to take down to the basement. She was somewhat ashamed of her need to hurry past Mrs. Donovan’s screen door, but she didn’t want to have to elaborate on the number of irate men seen leaving her apartment of late.

Mrs. Donovan was nowhere to be seen, though the now familiar scent of Lucky Strikes wafted out in the hall.

Strange, Catherine thought as she passed. There was a time when she could have imagined herself trying to conjure up Jonathan’s memory, if she, like Mrs. Donovan, had been the one left behind. Of course, she
had
been the one left behind essentially. But by choice, not by chance and, unlike Mrs. Donovan, she had recovered from it. She must be recovered, or else she would have been grateful to have been asked to Jonathan’s wedding. Any crumb of attention would have been better than no crumb at all. If she was still in love with him, she’d
want
to go. She’d want his new friends to see what a civilized and understanding woman he’d given up. She’d want to justify Jonathan’s trust in her by her exemplary behavior toward his new wife—instead of wanting to give him a well-placed kick in the groin.

She suddenly smiled. Another fine example of the difference between her fantasies and Pat Bauer’s.

The laundry room was poorly lit, but she wasn’t afraid. She put her first load of clothes into the washing machine and went to sit by the door that led to the parking area underneath the building because the light was better. The parking area was mostly an empty expanse of concrete with oil spots because very few of the tenants had cars anymore. They were either like her—financially unable to resurrect an old and dying vehicle from its terminal disrepair—or they’d become physically unable to drive, or they’d never learned in the first place.

She glanced out the glass-and-wire window in the door, squinting a bit at the shaft of sunlight that pierced the dark underpinnings of the Mayfair. Surrounded by the pleasant smell of hot, soapy water and the quiet rhythm of the washing machine, she reached into her pocket for Jonathan’s wedding invitation.

She carefully studied the handwriting on the envelope—not Jonathan’s but Ellen Jessup’s, she supposed. The script was rounded and vertical, almost childlike with its small, carefully closed-up letters. She wondered how much Ellen had been pressured into believing that the two of them could be friends. Poor Ellen. She must have hated sending this, but Jonathan could be so persuasive and so dense.

She opened the envelope and reread the invitation, running her fingers over the lettering as she did so. Engraved, not printed. But then, Jonathan could afford that. She wondered, too, what the Jessup woman had been told about the breakup of her fiancé’s former marriage. Jonathan’s behavior yesterday indicated that the reason was now clear in his mind at least, and that by some quirk of logic Catherine’s infertility had had little to do with it. He wanted it to be something else—some other catchall phrase for discarded wives, such as “irreconcilable differences.”