Lynn helped her unload her suitcase and showed her into the small spare room at the back of the house that held a narrow iron bed and an old black Singer sewing machine. The walls were covered in faded yellow paper printed with blue cornflowers. Lynn left her alone to unpack, but Jane was so tired that she fell asleep, fully dressed, and didn’t awaken until Lynn called her for dinner.
The meal proved to be surprisingly peaceful, despite Annie’s complaints that Lynn hadn’t mixed any butter in the mashed potatoes. Just as they finishing cleaning up, the telephone on the kitchen wall jangled. Lynn answered, and it didn’t take Jane long to figure out who was calling.
“How was your golf trip?” Lynn twisted the phone cord around her finger. “That’s too bad.” She glanced at Jane and her forehead puckered. “Yes, you heard right. She’s here. Yes… Talk to her?”
Jane shook her head and regarded her pleadingly. Annie stood up from the table where she’d been supervising the cleanup and, with a grunt of disapproval, made her way into the living room.
“I don’t think Jane wants to talk right now… No, I can’t make her come to the phone… I’m sorry, Cal, but I really don’t know what her plans are, except that she doesn’t want to see you.” She scowled. “You watch your tone of voice with me, young man, and you can just pass on your own messages!”
There was a long pause, but whatever Cal said didn’t seem to satisfy her because her expression grew more fierce. “That’s all well and good, but you and I have a lot to talk about, including the fact that you have a wife who’s four months pregnant, and you neglected to mention it!”
Time ticked by. Lynn’s frown gradually eased and puzzlement took its place. “I see… Is that so?”
Jane was beginning to feel like an eavesdropper, so she joined Annie in the family room, where the old woman dozed on the couch while one of the evening news magazines played on television. She had just taken a seat in the rocker when Lynn came in from the kitchen.
She stopped just inside the doorway and crossed her arms over her chest. “Cal told me a different story from the one you told, Jane.”
“Oh?”
“He didn’t mention anything about you tricking him.”
“What did he say?”
“That the two of you had a brief affair, and you got pregnant.”
Jane smiled, feeling a little better for the first time all day. “That was nice of him.” She looked over at Lynn. “You do know he’s lying, don’t you?”
Lynn gave a noncommittal shrug. “I guess for right now I’m reserving judgment about everything.”
Annie’s head popped up from the couch, and she scowled. “Unless either one of you’s got somethin’ to say that’s more important than Mr. Stone Phillips, I suggest you both hush up.”
They hushed up.
Later that evening after Jane had fallen asleep, Lynn sat on the couch trying to sort out her thoughts while her mother watched VH-1 with the volume muted, undoubtedly hoping one of Harry Connick, Jr.’s videos would come on. She missed Jim so much: the noises he made as he banged through the house, the soothing murmur of his voice in the middle of the night as he calmed a frantic parent on the telephone.
She missed the solid feel of that big warm body curled around her at night, even the way he always left the newspaper folded wrong side out. She missed living in her own house and being the boss of her own kitchen, but she also felt a strange kind of peace she hadn’t experienced in years.
Jim was right. He’d lost the girl he’d married long ago, but she was wiser than to think he wanted that girl back. It was himself he wanted back, the way he’d been in high school, when all of life’s possibilities still lay ahead of him.
As for herself, she knew there had been too many changes for her ever to be that happy, free-spirited person again. But neither was she the cool and controlled Mrs. Doctor Bonner, who had been well trained by her mother- in-law to repress all vulgar excesses of emotion.
So who was she? A woman who loved her family, that was certain. She took joy in the arts and needed these mountains around her as surely as she needed air to breathe. She was also a woman who could no longer accept second best from the man she’d loved since she was fifteen.
But Jim was proud and stubborn. By not capitulating when he’d mentioned divorce, she’d waved a red flag in his face. He never made idle threats, and if she didn’t move back into the house and resume their marriage, he would get his divorce. That’s the way he was, stubborn to a fault, just like his son. Both of them would break before they’d bend.
Her problems with Jim went back more than three decades, but what about Cal? She could read between the lines of what Jane had told her well enough to understand that Jane wanted a lifelong commitment, but Cal wouldn’t give it to her.
What was it about her son that made him fight marriage and commitment so ferociously? He’d been raised in a loving family. Why was he so resistant to having one of his own?
Even as a very young child, competition had been everything to him. She remembered teaching him hopscotch when he was so small he’d barely been able to walk, let alone hop on one leg. She’d been little more than a child herself, and he’d been her play companion as well as her son. She’d drawn a chalk outline on the old sidewalk outside the apartment where they’d been living, and she’d never forget the sight of that bottom lip caught between his teeth, all his toddler’s concentration focused on beating her. Now she suspected that the permanent ties of a wife and family had become one more symbol of the fact that the most important part of his life was coming to an end, and he had nothing to take its place.
Cal would undoubtedly have called his father right after he’d talked with her and told him about the baby. She’d been married to Jim long enough to know he’d be overjoyed at the idea of having new life in their family, and like her, he’d be concerned about Cal’s happiness. Unlike her, however, he wouldn’t be at all concerned about the feelings of the young woman sleeping in the spare room.
Lynn gazed over at her mother. “Cal must care about Jane, or he wouldn’t have lied to me the way he did.”
“Calvin loves her. He just don’t know it yet.”
“Neither do you. Not for a fact.” Even though she’d asked for it, her mother’s know-it-all attitude irritated her. Or maybe she wasn’t yet ready to let go of her hurt that Annie knew Jane better than she did.
“You can believe what you want.” Annie sniffed. “I know some things.”
“Like what?”
“She don’t put up with any of his nonsense for one. He likes that about her. She’s a fighter, too, and she ain’t afraid to go after him. Janie Bonner’s as good as they come.”
“If she’s such a fighter, why is she leaving him?”
“I guess her feelin’s got too much for her. She has a powerful love for that son of yours. You should see the way the two of ’em look at each other when they don’t think nobody’s watchin’. ’Bout set your eyeballs on fire.”
She remembered Cal’s recent happiness, along with the tears in her daughter-in-law’s eyes, and thought there was a good chance her mother was right.
Annie regarded her with shrewd eyes. “That baby of theirs is gonna be a smart little cuss.”
“It seems inevitable.”
“You ask me, it ain’t good for a special child like that to grow up all by itself. Look how bein’ an only child traum’tized Janie Bonner into gettin’ in this predicament in the first place.”
“You have a point.”
“She told me she felt like a freak growin’ up.”
“I can see how she would.”
“A child like that needs brothers and sisters.”
“But the parents would have to be living under the same roof for that to happen.”
“You’re sure ’nough right about that.” Annie leaned back in her rocker and sighed.“Seems me and you don’t have much choice, Amber Lynn. Looks like we’re gonna have to catch ourselves another Bonner.”
Lynn smiled to herself as she walked out on the porch after her mother had gone to bed. Annie enjoyed believing the two of them had single-mindedly laid a trap for Jim. It wasn’t so, but Lynn had given up trying to tell her mother that. Annie believed what she wanted to believe.
It was nearly midnight and chilly enough that she zipped the front of an ancient Wolverine sweatshirt from Cal’s
