little Mary, gives my sister an unwanted hug, then heads back to Elm Harbor until Sunday, perhaps to do something with Lionel, perhaps because she just needs a break. I am careful to walk away from the door, leaning heavily on my cane, before she streaks down the drive. I am relieved to have my son back in my arms at last. But he seems skittish around me, preferring to spend his time with Mariah’s brood. So, instead of hugging him for hours, which is what I would like, I watch him from a distance, in the yard, in the pool, in the basement playroom, and my heart sobs.
On the Monday, with Bentley back in Elm Harbor and Mariah off at some charity event, I borrow my brother- in-law’s Mercedes and drive to Borders in Stamford, where I buy enough books to keep me occupied for a while. Reading is easier than feeling. But I am planning, too. Planning my approach to Angela’s boyfriend. I not only know where he is; I also see the need for extraordinary caution. Even with Colin Scott dead and Foreman dead and Maxine and her employer fooled, there is another enemy out there, the one who hired the men who beat me up.
I ask my sister to try to find out who made the offer to buy the Shepard Street house, but she meets a blank wall. Some corporation, is all the broker will say.
Over breakfast on my ninth day in Darien, Mariah tells me that she will have a second houseguest next week, a divorced woman she knows from Stanford and her sorority, a fellow journalist, a mother of two, who will be leaving her children behind in Philadelphia to make this trip: “And Sherry is a wonderful person,” Mariah enthuses, “intelligent, successful, and really, really gorgeous.” When my sister adds shyly that Sherry will be taking the second bedroom in the guest house, I realize that her old friend’s visit is for my benefit, not Mariah’s, that even though I have been separated from my wife for perhaps a month-depending on whether one counts from Kimmer’s ultimatum or my release from the hospital-my sister is already trying to fix me up with somebody else. I do not know whether to be furious or charmed; I do know that it is time to go.
I tell her so.
Mariah begs me to stay longer, no doubt because I am the living proof, bullet holes and all, of her conspiracy theories. When I insist that I have to get back to work, my sister insists on helping. So she spends three days driving me all over Elm Harbor and its suburbs, looking at rentals, and giggling ostentatiously every time some silly real estate agent sees the baby in her stroller, makes the obvious assumption, and calls her “Mrs. Garland.” The agents giggle right back, even though they do not get the joke. None of the condos we see strikes my fancy. One is too small, another has no view. A big one on the harbor is too expensive, and Mariah, who has been unreasonably generous already, is too wise to offer me a subsidy. One of the agents says he has something in Tyler’s Landing he thinks I would like, but Tyler’s Landing is Eldridge territory, and the look on my face is enough to tell him to suggest another suburb.
Lemaster Carlyle finally resolves my dilemma. He strolls into my office on the third afternoon of my fruitless search, wearing one of his perfect suits, this one a lightweight navy worsted, handmade, featuring the faintest breath of chalk stripes, along with a monogrammed blue shirt, a tie of bright marigold and cobalt blue, and matching braces-an outfit any Wall Street lawyer would be delighted to own. His confirmation hearings are next week. I am in the building for only an hour or so, checking my mail, before Mariah comes to pick me up, so he must have been looking for me. I smile and we shake hands. Lem makes no mention of the events in the cemetery. He comes right to the point. He has heard about my problem, and we can help each other out. He and Julia, it seems, own a condo on the water-in a development just down Harbor Road from Shirley Branch’s, as a matter of fact. Two bedrooms, three baths, a finished basement, fine views, even if not as fine as Shirley’s. It was their first home in Elm Harbor, back when Lem was a promising young professor rather than a middle-aged academic superstar, and when they moved out to Canner’s Point, the market was so dead that nobody made a serious offer to buy the place; they began to rent it out, and have never dropped the habit. Their most recent tenant, a visiting professor of Christian ethics from New Zealand, left early and unexpectedly, with six months’ rent unpaid. They need a tenant, I need a place to live.
“I don’t know how you feel about having a colleague as a landlord,” says Lem, with the good grace not to look embarrassed. “But I suppose we won’t be colleagues very much longer, anyway. Besides, we can offer you a nice deal on the rent.”
I am beyond shame. Losing your wife to a student does that to you. “How nice?” He names a figure, which I recognize as a substantial discount from the going rate. I do not want charity, but I do not have much money. The mortgage payment on the Hobby Hill house is deducted monthly from my paycheck, not Kimmer’s, despite her substantially higher income, because the university’s Own-in-the-City program saved us two and a half points on the interest.
“So, what do you think?” he asks.
I make a lower counteroffer, just for form, and Lem has the further good grace not to display the annoyance he surely feels.
We split the difference, and Lem hands me the key. We are lawyers, of course, one of us on the verge of judicial office and therefore ethically painstaking, so he also hands me a lease to sign. As I scribble, he continues to chatter. He and Julia, he says, want to have me over for dinner as soon as the hearings end. As it is, Julia is already planning to deliver enough casseroles to keep me eating well into the summer.
I thank him.
So now I have a place to live. My sister dutifully exclaims over it, especially the rather distant view of the water, even though she is plainly disappointed that I am leaving her guest house and missing the gorgeous and desperate Sherry. But Mariah is a good sport. We drive over to Hobby Hill to pick up more of my things, mainly books and clothes, but only during the day, when Kimmer is not around.
Don Felsenfeld and Rob Saltpeter help me load the car.
“So now you have your bachelor pad,” says Don, twinkling. But I am thinking of the need to wait, impatiently but necessarily, for the right moment to visit Angela’s boyfriend.
I see Bentley as much as I can, which means as much as Kimmer will let me-which turns out to be quite a lot. She talks about how much she loves our son, how much he needs her with him, but her billable hours matter too. Kimmer has no au pair, and needs none: she has me. When she is running late, she calls me to pretty please pick him up, never asking whether it is convenient. When she has to go out of town unexpectedly, she calls on no more than an hour’s notice to ask if I can take him for a few nights. After all, I have nothing to do all day but recuperate from three bullet wounds, a bruised kidney, two bent ribs, and a broken jaw. Dana Worth murmurs one afternoon over lunch at Cadaver’s-her treat nowadays-that I should fight Kimmer for custody. I am tempted, but the truth remains what it has been all along: custody battles are ruinous to children’s lives, and I love my son too much to tear him in half.
“That’s what she’s counting on,” Dana points out.
“Then I guess she wins this round,” I snap, although my dilemma is hardly Dana’s fault. Yesterday marked Bentley’s birthday, which meant presents from Daddy in the afternoon, more presents from Mommy in the evening. He seemed calm, although confused; weakened by my injuries, I went home and wept.
Dana is consoling, in her way: “See, Misha? That’s what the same-sex-marriage folks have wrong. Why should I want to go through that nonsense?” For Dear Dana is no fan of what she calls the heterosexist lifestyle.
I refuse to let Dana discourage me. My four-year-old son and I stroll on the beach, or what passes for a beach in Elm Harbor, and I cannot believe the change in him. He does seem taller. He walks with an unexpected straightness. His gaze is more direct. And Kimmer is right: he cannot stop talking. Well, he never could, but now, suddenly, he is making sense.
“Do oh Daddy look the seagull, see the seagull Daddy?”
I nod, afraid to speak. My heart seems massive, a hot, painful weight in my chest. A few months ago this was a toddler whose favorite words were Dare you, and we worried about whether he was a little slow, and now he is absorbing language almost faster than the world can teach it.
I spend more time at the soup kitchen. Dee Dee and I compare canes: she can tell from the sound mine makes that it is second-rate. I grow fond of the women I serve. I know that few of them will see another decade, but I begin to admire their feistiness in the face of life’s many disasters, their cleverness in foraging around the edges of the welfare state for the benefit of their children, and, in many, their surprisingly strong faith. Most of the women, I finally see, truly want to love their children but do not know how. I visit Dr. Young to talk about getting some of the women into his Faith Life Skills program. He sighs. The program is nearly out of money and has no
