Getting that desk-jockey look about you.”
Cade scowled at Dodge across the table, and I knew he had hit a nerve. Back in Maryland Cade had run at least five miles every morning, but here the farm chores left no time for that before work, and in the evenings he was too tired. He couldn’t go tanning here either, and made self-conscious remarks to me about his increasingly wintry complexion. A few days before, I’d caught him looking at himself in the bathroom mirror, peeling down the waistband of his boxers to check for contrast, then rubbing his stomach as if to reassure himself it was still flat.
“Jill, you can come out, too,” Dodge said magnanimously, in a tone that made me suspect I was the first female he had ever invited into the boys’ club. “The two of you can compete. Make whatever bets amongst yourselves, like a good husband and wife.”
Candy giggled. Cade looked at me and rolled his eyes. In spite of my distaste for Dodge, the idea sounded like fun. It would be something to do at least, an interesting break from the monotony of our day-to-day routine. It might be good for Cade, too, to get his head back into the kinds of things people did up here instead of all the things he felt he was missing. I smiled and said, “Sure, I’m up for it. Why not?”
He narrowed his eyes at me before focusing down on his plate, stabbing at his potatoes as if it was personal.
“He needs to just relax and take a breather,” said Leela, wrapping a barn star in bubble wrap and slipping it into a shipping box. “Dodge has some funny ideas about things, and goodness knows that shouldn’t be any shock to Cade. And he’s always got to get all worked up anyhow.”
We were standing in Leela’s attic workroom, me with the roll of bubble wrap and a pair of scissors, Leela with the priority mail packing labels and boxes and a pen. On the desk the laptop was open to the eBay screen so Leela could get addresses, and indeed it did have a slip of electrical tape over the webcam’s camera lens. I cut off another length of wrap and rolled it around a star as she addressed the label in her spidery handwriting.
“You wouldn’t think they would dislike each other so much,” she went on, her voice a little distracted, “Dodge and Cade, two of a kind as they are. Both of them are men of strong opinions. Both have the stubborn idea that anyone who doesn’t agree with them must just be flat stupid. And their opinions aren’t so different, but I suppose it’s enough that each thinks the other is a dummy. Of course, Cade’s only twenty-one. He’s got lots of growing left to do. Dodge, I don’t know what his excuse is.”
“Maybe that he never expanded his horizons.”
“Maybe. It does a body good to get out and see the world. Elias sure is better off for it. Did you see what he brought me back?”
I shook my head, trying to make sense of her idea that Elias was better off. She patted a piece of tape onto the box, then walked over to a cabinet and pulled out a small rolled rug. Letting it unfurl to the ground with a flourish, she said, “It’s a real Muslim prayer mat. They kneel down on it and do that thing, bowing toward Mecca and all that business.”
“That’s pretty neat.”
She smiled. The delicate metal hooks of her bridgework showed. “Bet you it’s the only one in Frasier. I thought it was a bathroom rug when he first gave it to me. Wonder what the Muslims would think of
I grinned back, and she rolled up the mat and put it away. “Cade seems excited about the baby coming,” she said. “He’s going to be a good daddy. You don’t know, Jill, what a lucky thing that is to see a man who cares about all that. Eddy, God bless him, he hardly paid our kids any mind until they were walking and talking. Cade’ll be different, I can tell.”
I nodded, thinking back to the night before, when Cade had rested his palm against one side of my belly and his ear against the other as if trying to pull the baby closer.
“I was always terrified of being a single mom,” I admitted. “I didn’t want to have to struggle like my mother did. And if I couldn’t do as good a job, I knew I’d never be able to forgive myself.”
Her smile was tight as she peeled a label and smoothed it onto a finished package. “But that’s all mothering is. Whatever your own parents got wrong, you absolutely will not do, and whatever they got right, you’d darned well better get right, as well. That’s the disadvantage to those of us who had good mothers. We spend our whole lives trying to match them and can’t ever quite shake the feeling that we’re falling short.”
My voice was teasing. “Maybe it’s better to have a bad mother, then. Gives you higher self-esteem in the long run.”
“Maybe it’s better to know that your children love you regardless,” she said. “They don’t care how your mother was. They just want their own.”
I thought about that. During my first summer at Southridge, all the kids in the Alateen group had gathered around the campfire and told stories about their families. In the typical manner of girls my age I’d started to butt heads with my mother; her mere presence embarrassed me, her nagging about my room and my grades threw me into explosive tantrums and I looked forward to the chance to vent about my life at home. But I never got the chance, because the stories that made their way around the circle alarmed me into silence—tales of parents in denial, parents who couldn’t stay sober, or flew into rages, or passed out on the floor in puddles of their own bodily fluids. I understood then why my mother had sent me there, and my heart ached for the kids whose lives had become the collateral damage of their parents’ addictions. But it was true—they loved them even so. Admiration and love, I learned, are two entirely separate things.
“You’re going to be a good mother,” Leela said. “I can tell you’re a strong person. You’ve got the mama lion inside you. You haven’t seen her yet, but she’s there.”
Her praise warmed me. If she had been my own mother I would have rested my cheek against her arm as she worked beside me; but I knew she was Cade’s, not mine. “Hopefully nothing will happen to bring her out anytime soon,” I replied.
She laughed. “Oh, Jill,” she said, and her voice was rueful. “Peace never lasts long enough. That’s what’s true.”
Chapter 10
Sometimes during the day Candy will have that TV on, showing those court programs where people air out their dirty business in front of a judge. I don’t like to hear that stuff. Some things other folks just aren’t meant to know. Why I would ever care who’s the father of that baby or whether someone’s husband had a lady friend on the side, I can’t even imagine. You tell me what you want me to think about your circumstances, and I’ll take you at your word. It’s none of my business to go guessing at what you’ve got under the carpet.
My mother and father, they taught me not to stick my nose in the affairs of others, and thanks to that I never felt as though it was a lie to let folks go on believing their presumptions about me or my family. Even my own children never knew I had a husband before Eddy. It seems like a different person’s life now, that for four long years I had a different name and lived in a different state, sleeping in a bed every night with a man who was not Eddy. Of course it was so long ago now it doesn’t matter one bit. Children assume so many things that it isn’t hard to make an old life go away. At one point in each child’s life, when they realize what’s possible, they’ll look you in the eye and ask, “Did you ever have a boyfriend besides Daddy?” And you shake your head no, and just like that it’s gone. None of them ever asks again.
I’d been so lonely, living in Maine. The house Harold promised me had turned out to be a trailer, with secondhand curtains that didn’t hang right. These days I wouldn’t care too much, but a new bride is picky about those things and she has a right to be. She’s making up a home. As it was, all the women my own age, there at our church, had babies already. When they met up it was for coffee and to let the babies play, so they never thought to include me. And then finally I was expecting, and for a while they included me some. I was embarrassed about my
