The Woman Next Door (17 page)

Needing more comfort than the sandwich brought, she vowed to keep an eye out for Amanda. Amanda was a sure bet to give comfort.

Karen wanted to ask her about the mailman. While she was at it, she wanted to know what was in the manila envelopes that were coming and going next door. She figured that Amanda had a stake in all this. After all, if Lee wasn’t the father of the baby, even money said it was Graham.

***

Amanda immediately shook her head when Karen waylaid her as she climbed from her car later that afternoon and mentioned the mailman as a suspect. “Dominic? I can’t believe that he’d have the courage, much less the desire to impregnate Gretchen.”

“Because of his looks?”

“Because his mother is the center of his life.”

“How do you know?”

“I’ve talked with him. I was outside one day when he came by, and he was looking so down in the mouth that I asked what was wrong. He lives with his mother. She’s a semi-invalid, and he’s her major caretaker. He was upset that day because she needed to have dental work done and he didn’t have the money. The only alternative was to pull her teeth, and that was upsetting him.”

“A fine son,” Karen murmured. Putting her hands on her hips, she looked around the cul-de-sac. “Does Graham know anything?”

“I don’t think so.”

“Did he ask Gretchen?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Russ did. So did Lee. Isn’t Graham curious?”

Amanda was still for a minute. Then, softly, she said, “Karen, I don’t think it’s Graham. If he didn’t ask, it’s because he didn’t think it was important.”

“I’d say it’s important.”

“Okay. What did Russ and Lee learn?”

“Nothing. She wouldn’t say who the father is. Maybe she’ll tell Graham.” Her voice grew hushed. “Oh. Look. There she is.”

Gretchen came around the far side of her house with the garden hose in hand. When she glanced their way Amanda raised a hand in greeting. Gretchen nodded, turned her back, and began watering her beds.

“That wasn’t terribly friendly,” Karen murmured. “She’s toying with us.”

“It may just be that she feels awkward.”

“Because the baby’s father is one of our husbands?”

“No. Because we’re together and she isn’t our friend.”

“And whose fault is that?” Karen asked, raising a hand to wave at the paperboy, who was riding his bicycle down the street, his basket filled with the local weekly. “Hey, Davey” she called, then told Amanda, “I worked with his parents on last year’s Christmas bazaar.”

“Hey, Mrs. Cotter,” Davey called back, but he had stopped in front of the widow’s house and was holding out the paper while Gretchen crossed the grass.

“He may be towheaded and adorable, but I don’t think he’s a suspect,” Amanda murmured, but she was entranced watching the widow. When Gretchen smiled, as she was doing at the boy, there was a definite warmth to her. And a shyness. Amanda had never noticed that quality before.

The paperboy glided toward them with one foot skimming the pavement. He offered a paper to each.

“I haven’t seen your parents in a while,” Karen told him. “How are they?”

“They’re fine.”

“Tell them I say hello.”

“I will,” he said. He sailed off, tossing a paper onto the Langes’ front steps with a deft overhand lob and heading down the street.

As a matter of habit, Amanda opened the paper. She sucked in a sharp breath when she saw the headline.

BASEBALL STAR SUSPENDED AFTER DRINKING INCIDENT, read the headline, and the article went on to relate, in exact detail, the events of Tuesday.

Amanda murmured a soft, “Oh
no.”

Karen had unfolded her own paper and was reading the same piece. “Well, it
is
news.”

“Not like this. It’s not even on the sports page. Talk about being pilloried.”

“When you’re a star, you have to take the good with the bad.”

All Amanda could think about was Quinn Davis nervously rubbing his thumbs and forefingers at the meeting the other night. He wasn’t all calmness and confidence. A kid who was in control didn’t show up at baseball practice drunk. Given the vehemence with which his parents had tried to sweep his offense under the rug, this front-page exposure wouldn’t sit well with them. Amanda could only begin to wonder how it would sit with Quinn himself.

She had no sooner stepped inside her kitchen when the phone rang. It was Maggie Dodd, as concerned as she was about the article. Yes, school officials had been asked about the incident, she said, but they hadn’t given out details. Apparently those had come from the baseball coach, members of the team, and Quinn’s friends.

Amanda and she were talking about possible fallout when Maggie put her on hold to take another call. When she came back, her
voice was tight. “Quinn’s parents. They’re livid. They want to know how their son could be smeared this way.”

Part of Amanda agreed with Karen’s earlier, rather blunt assessment of the situation. In the four years that she had been reading the
Woodley Weekly,
there had been numerous front-page articles praising one Davis or another. This was the flip side of that coin, inevitable in some regards. To some extent, it
was
just news.

The other part of her—the counselor—worried about Quinn. “Let me call them,” she suggested to Maggie. “I’ll go over there to talk if they’ll let me.”

***

They wouldn’t. “That would be a waste of our time, Ms. Carr,” Quinn’s father said. “You could have helped us the other night. But you aren’t on our side.”

“It isn’t about taking sides,” Amanda reasoned. “It’s about doing what’s best for Quinn. My concern right now is for him. Has he seen this article?”

“Of course he has. He couldn’t miss it. His friends have been calling.
Our
friends have been calling.”

“Is he all right?”

“No. But that’s not your concern.”

“It is. It’s my job. It’s my
nature.
I’d really like to talk with him.”

“We’ll handle it. Thank you.” He hung up the phone.

***

Amanda felt helpless on the matter of Quinn. She wanted to talk it over with Graham. His instincts were good. He could reassure her or make a suggestion. It would be a neutral subject they could discuss.

For a minute, she thought her wish had come true. Graham called shortly after she hung up the phone with Quinn’s father.

“Hi,” he said cautiously. She could hear that he was in the truck. The reception had that hands-off quality.

“Hi. Where are you?” she asked, as she often did, wondering whether he was two, ten, or twenty minutes away. This time, though, her voice held the same caution as his, which made the question sound distrustful.

His voice reflected that. It was harder, closed to discussion. “Just now heading for Providence. I’m running way late.”

She let a beat pass. “Will this be every day?”

“I don’t know. It’s a good job. It helps fill the time when you’re at school.”

“I’m not at school every night.”

“Well, Tuesday you ran back.”

“It was important.”

“So is this.” He swore. Amanda heard the angry honk of a horn, then Graham’s angry voice. “That bastard just cut into my lane, smack in front of me at seventy-five miles an hour.”

“You don’t usually drive that fast.”

“I’m running late.”

“Was it a bad day?”

“Just busy.”

So much for conversation. “When will you be home?”

“Ten, eleven.”

“Okay. Have a good meeting.”

“Yup.”

Amanda hung up the phone thinking of all the things she could have said,
should
have said—all the ways she might have gotten him to talk more. But this Graham was a stranger to her. She didn’t
know how he would react to the things she said. She didn’t know how the things she said would even come out. Perhaps it was better that she didn’t even try to open up.

Sex might do it. They had always related on a physical level.

Although not in recent months.

But her period was ebbing, and she refused to think about the clinical aspects of baby-making, so maybe passion had a chance.

At least, that was what she was thinking when, later that evening, she bathed in bubbles, creamed her body with scented lotion, put on one of the slightly indecent nightgowns Graham had bought her during their earliest, randiest days, and climbed into their bed. As olive branches went, it was a fair one.

She lay nervously in the dark, glancing at the clock every few minutes from ten o’clock on. It was after eleven when Graham came in. She heard him come up the stairs and waited for him to come into the bedroom. Instead, he went into the den and turned on the television. At midnight, she went to the door and looked in. He was sleeping.

Wake him up,
part of her cried. But she couldn’t. If he was in the kind of mood he had been in on the phone, he wouldn’t be receptive to seduction. That would leave her feeling foolish and more unwanted than ever.

So she crept back to their bedroom and lay in the dark trying to clear unhappy thoughts from her brain, sleepless until sheer exhaustion finally took its toll.

She was awake at six-thirty the next morning, when Graham came into the bedroom. He went to the closet, took out clean clothes, removed the ones he had slept in and tossed them in the hamper, then headed for the bathroom. She listened to the sound of the shower and for a split second thought to join him there—then lost her nerve.

***

“Hi, cutie,” Maddie said when Amanda walked into her office.

“Hi, cutie,” Amanda said right back, but went straight to her computer and e-mailed Graham. “Are you there?” She knew it was the coward’s approach. But if it worked for the most reticent of her students, it might work for her.

After one student session and ten minutes wandering the halls looking for Quinn, she got a reply. “I’m here,” he wrote. “What’s up?”

“We need to talk,” she wrote back, sent the message, then spent thirty minutes in the teachers’ lounge talking with Quinn’s English teacher. The boy had been in her class that morning looking for all the world as if he didn’t have a care in the world. Had he been prepared? The teacher wasn’t sure. The assignment had been parts of
King Lear,
and they had watched a theater video during class.

Graham’s answer was waiting when Amanda returned to her office. “Fine. Talk.”

“Are you angry?” she typed in.

His response came in as little time as it took for him to receive, read, and reply. “Yeah, I’m angry. This isn’t the way our marriage was supposed to be.”

“Our marriage has been great,” she wrote back, underlining and bolding the “great.” “This is our first problem.”

“Are you referring to the baby thing or the trust thing?”

“Both,” she typed and had barely started reading transfer reports when his answer came back.

“But there is no issue of trust in the baby thing.”

“Yes, there is.”

“How?”

She thought about how to answer while she wandered the halls during a break in class. Some of her best student contacts had been
made during this kind of wandering. Visibility was important. Availability ran a close second.

There were no breakthroughs in the halls this time, though she did see Quinn. He was laughing with friends and seemed fine. He didn’t look her way but then, she didn’t expect him to. He was avoiding what he couldn’t handle.

Was she? She prided herself on being older and wiser than her students, but being evasive with Graham was not terribly mature.

So she returned to her office and wrote him her deepest fear. “What happens if we can’t have a baby? Can I trust that you’ll still want to be married to me?”

“I love you,” Maddie said.

Smiling sadly, Amanda gave the bird a treat. “You’re a sweetie.”

“Treat, sweet?” the bird asked.

“Treat, sweet,” she answered and offered another treat. Then she went back to her computer.

Graham’s answer came within minutes. “That’s such an insulting question,” he wrote, underlining and bolding the “such.”

“But I know how much you want children,” she typed back. “I know how much your family does. Your family means the world to you. I’m not sure I do.”

“It’s the choice thing again, then?”

“No. Just me needing reassurance. I haven’t been feeling very feminine lately.”

“Well, I haven’t been feeling very manly. It doesn’t help when you sleep in the den. Makes me feel like you don’t want me.”

“Who slept in the den last night?” she wrote back, then sent an instant follow-up. “E-mail sucks. That’s going to come across the wrong way. I’m not accusing you. It’s just that I don’t know what you’re feeling.”

“Rejected,” he wrote back.

Her heart ached. “Can we have dinner tonight? I’ll pick up steaks and a salad, and we’ll talk.”

While she waited for his reply, she met with another student, then ate lunch in the cafeteria with a group of juniors she was advising on a community service project. She spent an uneasy thirty minutes back in her office making notes on the student meetings she’d had that morning, before Graham responded to her invitation.

“You don’t talk. You accuse and withdraw.”

“That’s what I learned,” she wrote back, and nearly erased it. She could blame her parents all she wanted, but that wouldn’t help her own marriage. At some point, she had to take responsibility for her actions. That said, what she’d written did help explain why she did what she did. So she left it and added, “Help me change, Graham.”

His response came within minutes. “I’ll be home for dinner.”

***

Graham resisted thinking the word “divorce,” but having been through it once, it was an irrevocable part of his vocabulary. If his marriage to Amanda fell apart, that would make him a two-time loser. Coming from the family he did—coming from the religious background he did—it would be an emotional blow from which he might never recover.

Besides, divorce was so far away as to be laughable. He loved Amanda. They had hit a rocky stretch. That was all.

He wished he knew what to do. Everything about her said that she wanted to be left alone, so that was what he had done. If she wanted to sleep alone, fine. He was giving her space. He didn’t like it, but he didn’t see that he had a choice. He wasn’t demeaning himself by crawling to her, especially if she was having second thoughts about their marriage. Maybe she wanted out like Megan had. Maybe there was something wrong with him in the husband
department. Maybe there was something wrong with him in the
man
department.