Sleeping With the Enemy (11 page)

Mikey looked relieved, and her heart went out to him.  From the little that Jesse had said about his ex-wife, it sounded as though the boy didn’t see his mother very often.  Rose knew better than to attempt to take his mother’s place, but she hoped that she and Mikey would be able to build some kind of relationship.

After an interminable wait, Luke’s break was declared a simple fracture.  The resident on duty set it and applied a plaster cast, wrote out a prescription for pain meds, loaned Luke a pair of crutches, and sent them on their way.

Mikey rode in the cab of the truck with Rose and Jesse, but in order to make room for the cast and the crutches, Luke sprawled across the back seat of Rob’s Explorer.  The incident had taken a little over four hours, and Rose was so exhausted that her stomach was roiling with nausea.  It would certainly impress her groom if she lost her dinner in his lap on their wedding night.

Jesse’s house was a welcoming beam of light and warmth.  “Thank God,” she said as they pulled into the driveway.  “I was ready to stretch out in one of the treatment rooms and go to sleep.”

Mikey hopped out to help Luke from the Explorer, and Jesse took Rose by the arm and steadied her as they navigated the walkway of crushed white limestone.  “It’s one in the morning,” he said as he unlocked the door.  “Why don’t you go upstairs to bed?”

“I have to make sure Luke’s settled first.”

“I’ll take care of Luke.  We have to get to know each other sooner or later.  Now’s as good a time as any.”

She leaned against the door frame so she wouldn’t fall in a heap at his feet.  “Jesse,” she said, “I’m so sorry.”

“For what?” he said.

“For everything,” she said, stretching out both hands to encompass all the ills of the planet.  “This evening has been a disaster.  Our wedding night.  I know it’s not what you expected.”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” he said.  “This is only one night.  We’re going to be married for a long time.”

She supposed this wasn’t the time to tell him that she didn’t share his confidence regarding the longevity of their union.  “Thanks,” she said softly, as the rest of the crew slowly and laboriously approached the door.

“Go,” he said, giving her a gentle nudge.  “I’ll say good-night for you.”

Immeasurably relieved, she fell into bed, too exhausted to remove the clothes she’d worn to the hospital.  The murmur of voices floated up the stairwell, the voices indistinguishable but the soft buzz soothing.  Her last thought, before she drifted off into a dead slumber, was that she would have to work harder at being detached.  In spite of her best efforts, she was beginning to soften towards Jesse Lindstrom.

chapter seven

The first thing Monday morning, she loaded a funereal and sullen Devon and a remarkably sunny Luke into the Honda Civic and drove them to Jackson Falls High to register.  When they walked through the door of the principal's office, the secretary raised her eyebrows, then quickly bent over her typewriter and set out to break the civilized world's typing speed record.  Rose supposed her little family did make a striking picture:  her, with her funky jewelry and her hair the color of a circus clown's, Luke with his earring and his crutches, and Devon sporting the Elvira look, a fashion which Rose suspected hadn't yet made it this far north.

The principal was a rabbity man named Lamoreau who shuffled papers on his desk, cleared his throat incessantly, and would have dawdled half the day over the registration process if she hadn’t hustled him along.  She managed to get Luke enrolled in a music theory course, and Devon, who’d always pulled straight A’s, enrolled in a senior honors English that the little man lauded as being equivalent to a college-level lit course.  He wasted a little more time congratulating Rose on her marriage and telling her what a brilliant and innovative teacher her husband was.

“But I’m sure you already know that,” he fawned.  “We consider ourselves fortunate to have him here, a man of his talent.”

She cleared her throat.  “Yes, well, are we done here? I have another appointment.”

It was a bald-faced lie, but she couldn’t take him any longer.  Rose shook his sweaty hand, watched her kids toddle off to their first day in a new school, and made her escape.  Her next stop was the nearest state government office, where she hoped to pick up the paperwork to apply for a social work license from the state of Maine.  But the local office housed only the food stamp, child welfare, and DMV departments, and she was told there that she would have to either call or drive to Augusta for licensing information.

She drove back home and made the call, only to be transferred from department to department faster than a stomach virus.  After twenty minutes of telephone tag, she finally reached a live person in the right department, and was promised that the requested materials would be in the mail by tomorrow morning.

Discouraged, she made herself a slice of toast and a poached egg and sat down with the local newspaper to peruse the want ads.  Ten minutes later, thoroughly discouraged, she folded the newspaper back up, stuffed it into the trash, and poured the uneaten egg over it.  She didn’t want to be a telephone solicitor or a convenience store attendant.  She wasn’t qualified to be a marine biologist, and her car wouldn’t hold up long enough to deliver pizzas.  That pretty much took care of the available jobs in Jackson Falls.

When the phone rang around 12:30, she was staring glumly out the window.  The view was fabulous, but if she had to stay here in this house all by herself, day after day, she would probably go postal and kill someone.  Desperate for a human voice, she grabbed for the phone like a dehydrated man seeking an oasis.

It was her new husband.  “I thought you were supposed to be teaching,” she said.

“I have a free period.  I just thought I’d check in and see how it’s going.”

“You don’t even want to know.”

“What’s wrong?”

She gave him the fifty-cent economy version of her morning.  “Your principal,” she said, “is a total incompetent.  Somebody should put him in a cage.  I’m probably going to have to go back to college for another four years to get a social work license from the state of Maine, and I’ll be reduced to pumping gas down at Mom and Pop’s Variety to keep us in macaroni and Pampers.  I believe this is where I’m supposed to ask, ‘And how was your day, dear?’.”

“Devon’s in my senior honors class.”

“Really? That sleazy little geek didn’t tell me you were teaching it.  Although he did sing your praises
ad nauseum
.  He wanted to make it perfectly clear that you’re the fair-haired boy of Jackson Falls High.  How’d it go with Devon?”

“Mostly she just sat in the back of the room and glared at me.  I have to tell you, Rose, this is a conservative backwater school.  Dressed the way she is, it won’t be easy for her to blend in.”

“I figured that.  When we walked in this morning, the secretary ran for cover.”

“That’s Hazel.  Whatever you do, don’t insult her.  I’ll never get to use the photocopier again.”

“Hazel wields all the power?”

“You’d better believe it.  She’s been here since God wore diapers.  Nothing
gets by her, and she never forgets a face.  She remembers every kid who’s attended Jackson Falls High in the past forty years, knows who their parents are, and in most cases, their grandparents.  I graduated eighteen years ago, and if you asked her right now, I bet she could tell you exactly how many times I got called to the principal’s office during those four years and for what.  She’s one of the joys of small-town life.”

***

A half-hour later, Casey showed up at her door with a coffee cake.  “I thought you could do with a welcome to the neighborhood,” she said, and Rose burst into tears.

“It’s not that I’m so happy to see you,” she said, dabbing at her eyes with the hem of her tee shirt.  “It’s just that everything seems to make me cry these days.”

Casey patted her hand.  “Hormones,” she said with authority.  “Have a piece of coffee cake.  You’ll feel better.”

Rose heated a kettle of water and found the tea bags in a canister that was clearly labeled TEA.  Her new husband had to be the most organized person she’d ever known.  How long would it take for him to discover that she’d been hiding under a rock on the day they passed out domestic skills?

“So,” Casey said, breaking a piece of coffee cake into small bites, “how’s it going?”

“Oh, it’s going just ducky.  I should have a job by Easter at the latest.  As long as I don’t aspire to anything more exalted than convenience store attendant.” She leaned her chin on her palm and sighed.  “Jesse told me there were plenty of jobs in my field.  He lied.”

“The newspaper’s a lousy place to find a job.  I could call Dave Marshall for you.  He’s a marriage and family counselor.  Maybe he’d know of something.”

“Friend of yours?”

“Professional acquaintance.  I’ll give him a call.” She sipped her tea.  “How’s Luke doing?”

“Luke,” she said, “is my one ray of sunshine.  Thank God he’s that way.  If I had two like Devon, I’d probably commit hari-kari.”

Casey smiled over the rim of her tea cup.  “Is she still mad at you?”

“We’re currently in a state of armed truce.  But it isn’t looking good.  She’s furious with me for tearing her away from the love of her life.  Kyle.  God, just his name sets my teeth on edge.”

“Love is so intense at that age,” Casey said.  She squeezed her tea bag between her spoon and the side of her cup.  “Come to think of it—” She smiled gamely.  “Love’s pretty intense at this age, too.  Kind of like a five-alarm fire.”  She lay the tea bag on her saucer.

“If I didn’t like you so much, I’d probably hate you.  You make it look so easy.”

“Make what look so easy?”

“Love.  For me, it’s always been a disaster.  I just can’t make myself believe that it’ll work out.”

“And that,” Casey said, “is the problem.  How can love work its magic on you if you don’t believe in it?”

“It’s all a crock, anyway.”

“If I were you,” Casey said, wetting her fingertip and picking up the last crumbs of coffee cake, “I’d watch my back.  One of these days, when you least expect it, love is going to sneak up and bite you right on the butt.”

***

“Black fingernail polish.  Black! And black lipstick.  She looked like something out of a horror movie.”

Jesse paused with the door of the teacher’s lounge half open.  “You think the daughter’s something,” Hazel Palmer said in her acid-washed voice, “you should get a load of the mother.  She pranced into Lamoreau’s office, brassy as a new tack.  Bright orange hair, probably straight out of a bottle.  Bangle bracelets and earrings that looked laughable on a woman her age.  And get this—no bra.  Boobs jiggling all over the place under that white tee shirt.  I thought Lamoreau’d keel over right on the spot.”

“I can’t imagine,” Alice Lowery said in her quavering voice, “what Jesse could be thinking, taking up with the likes of her.”

“He’s a man,” Hazel said flatly.  “They’re all alike.  All of ‘em, after just one thing.”

Jesse opened the door the rest of the way and let it shut behind him with a bang.  “Afternoon, ladies,” he said pleasantly as he passed them on his way to the refrigerator.  Alice had the grace to blush, but Hazel just squared her shoulders and held her ground with the tenacity of a bulldog.  He opened the refrigerator door and retrieved the apple he’d left there this morning.  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?”  He leaned against the refrigerator, rubbed his apple on his sleeve, and took a big bite.

Alice’s open mouth clamped abruptly shut.  She was nearing retirement age, and everybody at Jackson Falls High knew about the bottle she kept in her left-hand bottom desk drawer.  She put a hand to her mouth, then turned and fled the scene of the crime, probably headed straight for the comfort of her friend Jim Beam.

Jesse stood his ground, facing off against the battle-ax.  Hazel knew he’d heard their comments, and the knowledge quivered in the air between them.  Finally, with a perceptible sniff, Hazel raised her chin in a clear gesture of dismissal and marched out the door.  It slammed shut behind her, and Jesse held back a grin.  Never, not if she lived to be a hundred, would Hazel admit that she’d backed down.  Her version of the story would never coincide with his.  But Jesse recognized the truth when he saw it.  He’d just done battle with the dragon lady, and he’d won.

***

She spent the afternoon puttering, unpacking boxes of household items and photographs, sorting the last twenty years of her life into three piles:  one to keep, one to toss, and one to give to Goodwill.  The job was physically and emotionally demanding, and she paused every so often to gaze out the window at a stunning view of that blue band of river winding off into the distance.  Beyond the meadow, to the south, grew a stand of fir trees so impenetrable that she imagined no light could possibly infiltrate that dense forest.  From somewhere beyond the trees, a small power boat putted into view.  The captain cut the motor, picked up his fishing road, and cast it into the deepest part of the channel.

The way the light fell on the boat, the soft wash of water against its hull, made her fingers itch to hold a brush and commit the scene to canvas.  It had been so long since she’d given up painting that the depth of her need still took her by surprise.  After that first art history class, Rose had taken a couple of studio art courses, and for a time, she’d immersed herself in working with line and form and color.  It had been a passion, and her teachers had praised her work, told her that she had talent.  But Eddie had been so uptight about the expense and the hours she was putting into it that after a time, she’d given it up.  By then, giving it up had been a little bit like cutting off an arm, but she’d told herself that there was no room in her busy life for something as frivolous as slapping paints on canvas.  She had responsibilities, a husband to take care of, a family to raise.  Painting just wasn’t as important as those things were.

But her soul had continued to yearn.  In the few days she’d been in Jackson Falls, she’d caught herself numerous times admiring the line of a barn roof, the play of light and shadow upon the grass of the town common, the early morning sky as the sun rose in a fiery ball over the river.  This place was a painter’s paradise that called to the artist in her.  Maybe it was time she heeded the call, gave something back to herself.  Maybe it was time she set up a studio, bought paints and canvas, and found out if she still had any talent.