Tempted (24 page)

The venom in her tone sucked the air from the room and left us breathless. It wasn’t that what she said didn’t make sense. Nor was it unexpected, not coming from Claire. But it brought back too many memories to be pleasant.

“What would you know about it?” said Patricia in a slightly strangled voice. “We’ve been married ten years. We have two children together. It’s not that easy to just walk away, Claire. You’d think it would be, but it’s not. And unless you’re in the situation yourself, you just don’t understand.”

“Understand what?” Claire shot back. “That you’re going to let him keep screwing up your life because he has a little ‘pwobwem’?” Her voice sunk into mockery.

“Patricia needs our support right now. If you can’t give it, maybe you should leave.” I could have given the same lecture. I felt the same way. But it wasn’t what Patricia needed to hear, not then.

“You said it yourself, Pats. You never wanted to be with a man who couldn’t control himself. You didn’t want to do that to your kids. Well, you’re doing it,” Claire said. “And unless you want to end up like Mom, I think you should kick his ass out and hire yourself a good lawyer.”

Patricia didn’t say anything, just stared. Mary and I looked at each other. I couldn’t take sides because I saw both of them. And I liked Sean, but liking a person and not liking the way they behave are two separate issues.

“Hate the sin and love the sinner,” said Mary after a moment. “I think she should help him get help, first. You don’t just stop loving someone because they’ve fucked up.”

“Good one, Mare.” Claire made a checkmark in her palm with a fingertip. “So how long should he fuck up before she should give up on him?”

Mary hesitated.

“That’s for Patricia to decide. Not us.” I squeezed Patricia’s hand once more, but she pulled it away.

“Claire’s right,” Patricia said. “She is right. But I just can’t up and leave him. I can’t.”

“I know,” I told her. “We all know it. Claire knows it, too.”

She’d have had to be endowed with superpowers to stand up to the combined force of three sisterly glares. Claire sighed and hung her head for a minute, then tossed up her hands in defeat.

“Fine. But when I’m the goddamned voice of reason, there is some serious shit going wrong. Some serious shit.”

Patricia sighed, looking around. “I won’t be able to do my share for the party. Just the scrapbook. All this stuff’s already paid for.”

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.

Mary nodded. “Yeah. It’ll be fine.”

Claire also sighed and chimed in to the feel-good moment. She leaned over, looking at the album. “You’re doing a good job, Pats. This is really nice.”

It wasn’t all fixed, but Patricia gave her a small smile. “Thanks.”

The squabble of raised voices in the hall dispersed us. Claire went to referee the argument over who got the red marker. Mary’s phone beeped and she left for privacy to take the call. Patricia and I looked at each other.

“Tell me I’m not like Mom, Anne.”

“You’re not. It’s not the same.”

But we both knew it really was.

James was once again not home when I got there, though the soft sound of music and smells of good cooking greeted me. Spaghetti sauce bubbled on the stove, and garlic bread tempted me to break off a piece, though I wasn’t really hungry. I grabbed a glass of iced tea and sipped it as I shucked off my shoes and found a hair band in the junk drawer to pull my hair off my neck.

“Hey.” Alex appeared in the doorway. “Jamie’s going to be late. I guess they got caught on some job with some cement or something…something like that.”

I smiled. “Sounds familiar. You made dinner again?”

He grinned. “I have to make sure you don’t mind having me around.”

I studied him over the rim of my glass. “Uh-huh.”

He moved closer. “It’s not working?”

I pretended to think about it. “How are you with cleaning toilets?”

He leaned closer. Sweet tension flared, but he didn’t move to kiss me. “Give me a thong and I’ll do what I can.”

I needed to laugh after the afternoon with my sisters. Patricia’s situation had done more than make me sad for her, it had called up a whole mess of garbage we usually kept locked away. I looked into his dark gray eyes.

Alex offered escape, if I wanted to lose myself for a little while. Yet we stood, somehow shy, like we hadn’t already tasted each other coming. He nodded toward the stove.

“It’s almost ready, if you’re hungry.”

A few minutes earlier food had been the last thing on my mind, but now my stomach rumbled. “Yes. There’s salad in the fridge, too. I’ll get that.”

“It’ll take a few minutes for the pasta to boil. Why don’t you go take a shower?”

My lips curved upward. “Do I offend?”

“No.” Alex reached out to twine a stray curl around his finger. It bounced back like a spring when he let it go. “But you look like you could use a few minutes alone.”

I gaped, astounded. The next moment I was in his arms, my face pressed to the front of his T-shirt as tears burst out of me. James’s T-shirt I realized, but it smelled of Alex now. Alex stroked my hair and put his chin to the top of my head. He said nothing, questioned nothing, made no effort to draw out my troubles. He was simply there in a way James, who’d have tried to get me to talk, wouldn’t have been.

I didn’t cry long. The emotion was too intense to maintain and quickly replaced by a different, more selfish feeling I’m a bit ashamed to admit. I tipped my face, which I was sure was red and swollen, to look at him.

“Sorry.”

“You don’t have to be.” He pushed my hair off my forehead with one fingertip.

“Don’t you want to know what’s wrong?”

Alex leaned back, his hands on my upper arms as he looked at my face. “No.”

This made me pause. “No?”

“If you want to tell me, you will.” He shrugged, then smiled. “If you don’t want to talk, that’s fine, too.”

It was a simple answer. I didn’t know if I wanted to talk or not, what I wanted to say. How much I wanted to share. Giving him my body was one thing. Giving him myself was something altogether different.

“It’s my sister,” I said, and the story seeped out of me in fits and starts. I didn’t share every detail, particularly the parts about how her story paralleled our mother’s. I paced while I talked, and he leaned against the counter, listening with his arms crossed.

“I’m worried about what will happen to her,” I said finally. “I want to help her, but I don’t know what I can do, really.”

“Sounds like you’re doing the best thing for her, which is to be there.”

“It doesn’t feel like it’s enough.”

“Anne,” said Alex after a moment. “You can’t fix everything.”

I’d been watching my fingers trace the swooping patterning of flecks in the countertop, but at that I looked up. “I know that.”

He had so many different smiles. This one was a small lift of lip and brow. Something like a smirk but not as smug. “No, you don’t.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that you think you should be able to fix your sister’s life. Fix her problems. You want to fix everything, and you hate that you can’t.”

My mouth worked as denial tried to come out. “That’s not true.”

His brow lifted a bit higher. “Sure, it is.”

I shook my head. “Absolutely not. It’s just that she’s my sister and I want to—”

“Fix it.” The smile had grown vastly more smug.

“Why are you so convinced you know me?” Irritated, I grabbed up a dishcloth to wipe down the already clean counter. It gave me something to do with my hands and a place to focus my gaze so I didn’t have to look at him.

He didn’t say anything for a minute, but I refused to look up. “Maybe it’s not you,” he said at last. “Maybe it’s just me.”

He’d snared me. I threw the cloth down and gave him my gaze. “What?”

I’d thought maybe he was just playing games, but his face looked serious. “Wanting to fix things all the time. Make things better.”

“Well…is it?”

Tension unfurled again, tinged with something I couldn’t quite identify. He rolled his head on his neck, cracking his spine. This time, he was the one avoiding my eyes.

“Forget it. You’re right. I don’t know you. I’m just talking a lot of bullshit. I’m good at that. I shouldn’t have said anything.”

Sometimes the picture someone else paints of us is a more accurate portrayal than a reflection. What we see in the mirror is always reversed. A portrait not only allows us to see our own faces, but how it looks to others.

“I can’t fix everything.” I said it aloud, knowing it was true.

He looked at me. “But you’d like to.”

“Wouldn’t anyone?”

Alex ran a hand through that silky hair so it fell in rumpled smoothness over his forehead. “But not everyone blames themselves when they can’t do it. Most people understand the entire universe doesn’t rest on their shoulders. Most people, Anne, understand that just because you want to make something better doesn’t mean it’s your fault when it doesn’t happen.”

“You have sisters,” I said.

“Three, all younger.”

“And you never felt like you had to help them out? Give them a hand? Protect them, or make it better?”

He made a small noise. “Fix them? All the time.”

“And could you?”

“No.” Again, he ran his hand through his hair, then crossed his hands over his chest, tucking them under his arms like he wanted a way to keep them still. “And I feel like shit about it, too.”

We both smiled in mutual understanding. The song on the stereo moved into something slow and sweet. We stared, saying nothing. Alex untucked a hand and held it out to me.

I took it. He pulled me closer, step by careful step, until our bodies pressed against one another. His shirt was still damp from where I’d wept, and I closed my eyes to breathe in the scents of fabric softener and soap mingled with his own unique smell. He held me for a while until we started moving slowly to the music.

We danced. One song blended into the next. It didn’t matter about the lyrics or the artist, not even the beat. We found our own rhythm there in my kitchen. We moved in perfect time, one step leading to another and the next without hesitation or bumbling. The music played on as we swayed.

We danced in silence. Not because there was nothing to say, but because we didn’t have to speak aloud to understand each other. We didn’t have to talk to explain ourselves. Right then, there was nothing wrong.

We had nothing to fix.

It’s amazing how quickly things became familiar. How easy it was to adjust. The tidy little life James and I had formed melted and re-formed to include Alex.

There were benefits to it. Sex. A third set of hands to help around the house. Another bank account to draw from; for Alex was generous in his contributions to our budget. A less tangible but more appreciated benefit was the way having Alex with us kept James’s mother from dropping by as she’d been wont to do for the first six years of our marriage. She even stopped calling the house, preferring instead to reach James on his cell phone.

There were drawbacks, too. Two other bodies in my bed, both snoring. More laundry to wash and fold and put away—though Alex never asked me to wash his clothes, they had a tendency to end up strewn around in odd places, and I never knew what jeans belonged to which man until they were already in my basket. When we weren’t all tangled up together, I sometimes felt like a third wheel, not privy to their in-jokes or moronic forays back to adolescence. It was sometimes like living with Beavis and Butthead.

“Why do you do that?” This came from Alex. James wasn’t paying attention, his eyes focused on the television where their lame and loud video game was blaring. Alex had brought home the latest game system and they’d been playing nonstop for hours.

“Do what?” I stopped on my way out of the room.

“If you want us to stop playing the game, why don’t you just say so instead of getting all frowny?” He actually looked interested in my answer, unlike his cohort who was hooting with glee at the cartoon carnage.

“I did say so, about twenty minutes ago.”

“No, you asked us if we wanted to go to dinner and a movie tonight.” Alex let go of the controller completely, which did get James’s attention, since that meant Alex’s character was no longer shooting. A monster came and ate his head. James grumbled.

“And obviously you don’t.” I folded my arms. The video game system had way underwhelmed me. I didn’t care how many bytes of memory it had or what sort of graphics card, or how hard it was to get.

“See? Why do you do that?” Alex unfolded himself from the floor in a long, lean motion. “Now you’re pissed off.”

James looked up. “Huh? What’s she pissed about?”

“Because we’re ignoring her,” Alex told him.

“Huh?” James seemed honestly stumped. “No, we’re not.”

“Yes, fucker, you are.” Alex tried to take me in his arms, a ploy I resisted without success. “We’re ignoring our Anne, and it’s pissing her off. What I want to know is, why do you walk away like that instead of telling us to get the fuck off our lazy, immature asses and take you out to dinner and a movie?”