A Fool and His Honey

in jail with Craig?”

“Uh, well, yeah. You know. We, uh, we wrote a few bad checks.”

So Rory wasn’t any desperate felon. I hadn’t known how tense I was until I relaxed.

“Whose name did you sign to the bad checks?” Martin asked. I glanced at him admiringly, for making a point I’d never have considered.

“Well,” Rory said, trying on his charming grin, “ours. Or it’d have been forgery. Much more serious.”

Rory seemed to know his way around the penal code.

“Craig’s boss would have paid him that money at the end of the month; we just needed it a little earlier than that.”

Martin and I looked at each other with raised eyebrows. This sounded very weak to me. It was becoming all too clear that Regina had made a poor choice in the man she married. Of course, some people thought I had done the same when I married Martin. Ha! At least Martin had never been in jail! I thought. I opened my mouth to make what would have been a very ill-timed query, when we were interrupted.. The phone rang, startling all of us out of our skins. In Hay-den’s case, this naturally meant he started to cry. I began patting him more rapidly, saying “Sshhhh, baby,” in an increasingly frantic whisper, as Martin grimaced at me while he tried to hear the caller.

“Give him his Binky,” suggested Rory.

“His what?” I patted faster.

“His pacifier.”

A lightbulb went on in my head as I remembered seeing Lizanne’s baby sucking on a plastic thing.

“Where?” I asked eagerly. “Where is one?”

“You didn’t find one in the diaper bag?”

Martin’s scowl increased in ferocity.

“No.” I scooted into the kitchen as fast as I could burdened with Hayden, and returned with the diaper bag. I thrust it at Rory. “Find one!” I told him.

The young man turned the bag around, opened a Velcroed flap, and reached in a pocket, one I hadn’t even noticed. He pulled out a plastic and rubber object and offered it to me.

It looked like it had lint on it. I stuck it in Hayden’s mouth anyway.

Blessed silence.

Rory beamed at me angelically. Hayden’s face looked just as sweet, all of a sudden. Martin became my handsome husband instead of Ebenezer Scrooge. I felt as if the vise clamping my temples had been loosened a couple of turns. I sat down on the couch very carefully, easing Hayden onto his back. He looked up at me with hazy blue eyes, relaxed and content.

“Hello, sweetie,” I said softly, watching the baby’s hands curl and straighten. His fingernails, his tiny fingernails, how would I ever cut them?

Martin said into the receiver, “So you haven’t found her or seen any sign of the car?”

I snapped back into our current situation with some reluctance.

“Umm-hrnmm,” he said. “I understand.”

Rory was looking down at the shabby boots on his feet, and I could practically feel the force of his hope that Martin would say nothing.

“She hasn’t called here,” Martin said, as if he was confirming what the caller had already stated. “No.” While he was talking, Martin was eyeing Rory with the same calculation he showed when he was hiring someone. Martin seemed to reach a conclusion. He turned his back on the boy. “No, we don’t know anything more than you do. Please keep us posted. Anything you find out, we want to know as soon as possible.” After another minute’s worth of listening, Martin hung up.

“If you don’t explain things to my satisfaction,” he told Rory grimly, “I’ll pick up the telephone in a minute. Now, when did Regina have this baby and why didn’t anyone know about it?”

“Could I have something to eat and a little trip to your bathroom before I have to explain?” Rory asked.

“You’re welcome to go to the bathroom,” Martin said, “but before we feed you, we have to know more about you.”

The young man looked surprised at Martin’s refusal. I was a little embarrassed at not offering hospitality right away, but I could see Martin’s point. We’d probably already made a mistake in not calling the police the moment we’d seen him. We shouldn’t compound that mistake by turning Rory into our welcome guest.

While Martin showed Rory the downstairs bathroom, I put Hayden upstairs in the portable crib and took a minute or two to get dressed. Jeans and a sweater, a vigorous tooth-and hair-brushing, and I felt like a better woman. I put on my red glasses to set off my navy sweater. After I ran a brush through my tight waves, my hair crackled with so much electricity that it flew around my head like an angry brown cloud.

This might be the only moment I had to myself today, I figured, so I called the hospital in Atlanta to ask about John.

Mother answered the phone in his room. She told me in that hushed voice people reserve for bedsides of the very ill that John was resting, that tests were ongoing, and that John had definitely had a cardiac incident, which I interpreted as “heart attack.”

“What are his options?” I asked, and Mother said all those buzzwords like “angioplasty” and “stress tests.” I barely listened, because all I wanted was the bottom line: Was John likely to die soon or not? After I’d gathered that he was going to live, barring some sudden and drastic circumstance, I was content to save the details of his treatment until I could spare a portion of my brain to understand what was entailed.

Mother didn’t say a word about the baby. She was preoccupied, too.

I tightened the laces on my high-tops and tried to tiptoe down the stairs. Martin and Rory were in the kitchen, and I saw that Martin had relented enough to pour the boy a cup of coffee and microwave a couple of cinnamon rolls for him. Rory looked up when I entered, and let a gleam of admiration show a little too obviously. So I didn’t offer to fix him any bacon or eggs.

“Rory here was just telling me about Craig,” Martin said. He was sitting opposite our visitor, his arms crossed over his chest, his face relaxed and cool. Mr. Skeptical.

“What was he saying?” I slipped into a chair at one end of the table. The back part of my brain was wondering if I could borrow a baby monitor from someone. Wasn’t that what the surveillance thing was called?

“I was telling Mr. Bartell, I’ve been Craig’s friend since we were little. Our folks were friends, too. Then when Craig’s mom and dad died, Craig moved in with his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Harbor. His brother Dylan was old enough to be on his own, but too young to keep an eye on Craig, and the Harbors were glad to have him.” Rory paused to take a bite of cinnamon roll, and I worked on keeping the relationships straight in my head.

“And that was the couple at Regina’s wedding, the people who acted in the place of Craig’s parents?”

“That was his aunt and uncle, Mr. and Mrs. Harbor,” Rory confirmed. “They had raised four girls of their own. But now Mr. Harbor, he’s kind of sickly.”

Martin and I sat blinking at him like foolish owls.

“Would that be Hugh Harbor?” Martin asked, obviously dredging the name up from his distant memory.

“Yep,” Rory mumbled, caught with more sweet roll in his mouth. “Mrs. Harbor used to be a Thurlkill.”

“And your folks?”

“My mother, Cathy, used to be a Thurlkill, too,” Rory said, seeming rather proud of the fact. “Me and Craig’re kind of related. My dad is Chuck Brown, his dad was Ross Graham.”

Martin looked away from the table, letting his gaze light on the front of the refrigerator. I knew he was thinking deep thoughts because his fingers were twiddling, the way they do when he’s having ideas he can’t talk about.

“Craig’s brother was at the wedding,” he said abruptly. “He seemed like a nice enough guy.”

“Dylan’s a great guy,” Rory agreed readily. “And he and his wife Shondra, they have the cutest little girl.”

Martin did a little more staring and twiddling.

I felt like I had to say something.

“Rory, when you feel like freshening up, there’s a toothbrush in a plastic wrapper in the top drawer in the downstairs bathroom,” I told our surprise guest. “There are extra towels in the closet by the sink, and I think I have shampoo and soap out and ready.”

Rory took the not-too-subtle hint in a jiffy. “That was real good,” he told Martin sincerely, carrying his coffee cup and plate over to the sink.