A Woman's Place Read online

  “Since when do judges tell parents what to do?”

  He was right. “It’s a long story, sweetie. Complicated.”

  He crossed his arms on his chest and wore a look that I suspected I had worn myself more than once, when I wanted an explanation for something I felt was wrong. Another cliché wouldn’t do.

  “The judge thought,” I tried, “that, with Grandma being so sick, Daddy would be able to give you and Kikit more attention. It’s just for now.”

  “For how long?”

  “Not long.”

  “How long?”

  “I don’t know. It could be a few days, or a week, or a month.”

  “Then what?”

  “Then, whatever we decide is best for you and Kikit.”

  I heard a noise and looked back to see Dennis in the doorway. He was still holding Kikit. “Everything okay here?” he asked.

  Johnny didn’t say a word.

  “Everything is fine,” I said. But it wasn’t. Kikit’s face was streaked with tears. Johnny looked like he was crying inside. And I was bleeding, positively bleeding from the soul.

  It was three-fifty.

  Johnny’s arms were no longer folded, but he continued to stare. I took his hand again, relieved when he allowed it, and tried to mold it to my grasp. “The important thing to remember is what I told Kikit. We’ll talk on the phone all the time. I’ll go to the library with Kikit on Wednesday and pick you up after practice, and then we’ll do something together for dinner. Hey. There’s a big game Saturday, isn’t there?”

  He didn’t say anything at first. Then he shrugged.

  “Can I come?”

  There was another pause, another shrug. His hand lay limp in mine. I gave it an encouraging squeeze.

  “When can we see where you’re gonna live?” Kikit asked.

  “As soon as I find a place.”

  “So we’ll have two homes?”

  “Two homes.”

  Her eyes lit. “Can we build one in the tree, you know, the one I always climb?”

  “No, we cannot.”

  “Then at Brody’s.” She came alive then. “That’s the best idea, Mommy. You can live at Brody’s.”

  I didn’t look at Dennis. “Uh, sorry, baby, but that’s out.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because Brody’s house belongs to Brody. I need something for me.”

  “He wouldn’t mind it if you stayed with him. He loves it when we come.” She gasped, put her hand to Dennis’s cheek and said, “I know what to do for dinner. Let’s get Brody to make us steak soup!”

  I refused to look at Dennis, but concentrated solely on my children during those last few minutes that I had with them. Kikit found a dozen different ways to ask the same questions, most of which had to do with how she could reach me if she needed me. I tried to be reassuring, directing my answers as much to Johnny as to her, but I felt as though my insides were being pulled, pulled, pulled slowly away from my body. The feeling increased when Dennis started looking at his watch. When he set Kikit down and came toward me—I think he would have taken my arm if I hadn’t risen on my own—I felt a tearing.

  “Say good-bye to your mother now,” he told the children.

  Fighting tears, I reached for Johnny. He didn’t budge.

  “Please, John,” I whispered. “I need your help.”

  He let me draw him into a hug. I swallowed against his head and managed a wobbly, “I’ll talk with you later, okay?”

  “Hold me, Mommy,” Kikit cried. “Hold me.”

  Drawing back, I kissed Johnny’s forehead, whispered, “I love you, sweetie,” and turned to Kikit. She was in my arms in an instant, holding me so tightly she trembled. Or was the trembling mine? No matter. We sat there together on Johnny’s bed, holding each other, not saying a word.

  “Claire,” Dennis said.

  I kissed her and whispered, “Gotta go, baby.”

  Her arms tightened. “No, Mommy, don’t.”

  Dennis scooped her up from behind, breaking her hold of me. The sight of her reaching for me, arms and legs, even while Dennis drew her away broke my heart.

  “Wednesday,” was all I could manage, and that, brokenly. I didn’t look back again, didn’t think I could survive a greater level of loss than that which was already shredding me to bits. I ran down the stairs, grabbed my purse and keys, and ran out the front door to the car.

  Kikit must have escaped Dennis, because no sooner had I backed out of the driveway, then she bolted from the front door and began running toward the car. Dennis caught her when she was halfway across the yard, swept her up in his arms, and turned back to the house.

  I nearly stopped. That I didn’t was only partly because of Dennis’s threat. The rest had to do with knowing that prolonging the parting would only make it worse.

  It was bad enough without that. Nothing that had come before had prepared me for the pain of walking out of that house and leaving my children behind. As symbolic moments went, it was brutal. As symbolic moments went, it was brutal. As pearls went, it was black.

  My last view of the house that day, burned indelibly in my mind, was of Dennis’s rigid back, Kikit’s furious feet kicking over his arm, and, off to the side and alone, my first-born, John, staring off down the street after me as I drove away.

  I went to the office straight from there, because I was too upset to go anywhere else. Carmen had said I couldn’t live with Brody, so I wouldn’t, but this was where I worked. What with avoiding unnecessary travel for a while, I would be spending more time than ever here. Neither the court, nor Dennis, nor Carmen could deny me that.

  Anyway, Brody wasn’t around. He was on the Vineyard negotiating with contractors to work on our store there. A fierce tropical storm had blown through in early October. We needed a new roof and siding. He had wanted to postpone the trip after learning the results of the hearing, but I had insisted he go.

  I was half sorry now. I kept reliving those final moments, seeing that final scene over and over and over again. I could have used his company.

  The place was deserted. I left the car and wandered through the lowering dusk to the seaward ledge. The tide was in. Below me, beyond rocks and sand, it rushed forward, fell back, rushed forward, fell back. Had the wind been up, there would have been explosions of spume, but it was as calm a night as the ocean saw, breezy was all.

  I held myself there on the high rocks and listened to the rhythm of the surf. But the hollowness that I’d felt at the house had started to swell, and the sight of Kikit’s flailing legs and Johnny’s aloneness haunted me. Though I wore a sweater, jeans, and a long gabardine coat that should have protected me from the breeze, I felt chilled. Staring out at the endless sea, I felt pitifully small.

  Back at the office, soft night lights burned, the glimmer of sconces by the door, the pale glow of others inside. I let myself in and dropped my coat on the divan by the reception desk. Then I stood in the dimness and looked around.

  How many other times I had done the same, feeling pride at what WickerWise had become. I felt none of that now. WickerWise seemed a liability, a reason for Dennis to rebel, an excuse for the judge to take away my kids.

  Knowing that the office held no lure for me, I headed for the workroom. The rocker that I had been working on was there, neat holes where I had removed broken pieces of wicker. There were more to be removed before I began the reweaving, but I didn’t feel like doing that either. I had gone one too many nights with too little sleep, one too many hours with too little hope. I felt drained of life, beaten down and weak.

  Without turning on a light, I made my way up the open staircase that hugged the wall. The storage loft extended over half of the workroom and the entirety of the office space, and was festooned with skylights that, at their lowest, offered night glitters from boats, houses ashore, even the lighthouse several miles up the coast. The moon was half shrouded in clouds, silver scallops around billows of slate. Whitecaps on the ocean came and went.

 
I stepped carefully over and around stacked pieces until I reached a long wicker sofa. I had found it several years before at a yard sale that my Kansas City franchisee had taken me to. Its cushions were long lost; without them, its enveloping quality was even more marked.

  That enveloping quality drew me to it now. Its seat was deep, its arms broad, its back tall to the shoulders, angled behind that for neck support.

  It creaked when I sat, the soft, easy creak of time and heart. There was more creaking when I wedged myself in a corner and kicked off my flats, more creaking when I snagged a bedraggled afghan from the perambulator that stood nearby. Knees bent, heels touching my bottom, I covered myself and closed my eyes.

  The smell of old was there in the loft, worn wicker that life had touched with sun, flowers, dust and rain. I tried to put a story to the sofa—imagined it in a Southern parlor under ladies in lovely lawn dresses, or on a wide verandah overlooking a rolling acre of newly cut grass. I tried to hear gentle voices, soft laughter, sweet promises, but all I heard were Kikit’s screams as Dennis carried her into the house and Johnny’s silence. My imagination was shot, my heart fractured, all of me dead tired.

  I must have fallen asleep, because the view from the skylights was different when next I looked. More lights had gone on up the coast in pin-pointed clusters, and a half-baked moon had cleared the clouds. I heard the shoooo-sha-shoooo-sha of the ocean and something else—a car, probably what had woken me. Since Brody wasn’t due back until the next day, I guessed it was Dennis checking to see where I’d gone.

  A flare of anger held me where I was. If he wanted to think I was in Brody’s bed, let him. He wouldn’t get a picture this time. Besides, the judge had already ruled against me. I had nothing to lose.

  I heard the door open in the reception area, heard footsteps, a pause, then, “Claire?”

  Not Dennis at all. Brody.

  My anger held. He was supposed to be on the Vineyard seeing to things that I couldn’t.

  “Claire?” Closer now, at the door of the workroom, then inside. “Claire?”

  “Yes,” I said and tightened the tattered afghan around me.

  I heard him cross the workroom floor and start up the stairs. “What are you doing up here?”

  “What are you doing back here?”

  He materialized at the top, shadowed but large. “I got to Woods Hole. There was a problem with the ferry, so I turned around and came back. I didn’t want to be there anyway.”

  So much for relying on my right-hand man. “You had meetings planned.”

  “They’ll hold.”

  “That work needs to be done.”

  “It’ll hold, Claire,” he repeated and began picking his way through the rubble of treasures to my sofa. The closer he came, the more detailed he was in the thin blue of the moon. “Why are you up here?”

  “Where else should I be? I’m homeless.”

  “Not homeless. You have my house.”

  “Mi casa es su casa? Yeah, well, that’s what got me into this mess. No”—I took a quick breath—“it’s men who got me into this mess. My mother had it right. She used to talk about a defective gene, what with my father dying and leaving a mess and Rona’s two husbands—and I always argued against it, but, damn it, here I am, in a major mess, thanks to men. Dennis, the judge, even Johnny—Johnny’ll be a problem, you mark my words, he won’t take this as easily as Kikit—so what is it about the male of the species? Power? Ego? Innate weakness?”

  “Hey. I came back here because I was worried about you.”

  “God save me from chivalrous men. No, don’t sit there,” I cried when he lowered himself to my sofa. He raised himself fast. “This is my space.”

  He moved away, bumped into something.

  “Be careful, Brody. You’re kicking things that are worth millions.”

  He had the good grace not to contradict me, though we both knew “millions” was an exaggeration. Instead, with caution, he asked, “Has something else happened?”

  “No. Just the same old shit, the same new shit.” I could have told him about that moment when I had driven away from my children, and he would have bled for me. But, damn it, I didn’t want sympathy just then. I wanted justice.

  I hugged my knees while he drew up a ladder-back chair that awaited recaning. He slouched into it, crossed his arms and his ankles.

  “Do you know how bad that is for the chair?” I asked.

  I got no response at first. Then I heard a chuckle. Granted, it was gentle. Still.

  “You think it’s funny? This is my livelihood, Brody. Clearly, I can’t rely on my husband anymore, though God knows I haven’t been able to do that in years, but at least there was an illusion of it. Well, that’s gone. For all I know, he’ll sock me so hard for alimony that I’ll be forced to drain every reserve I have, and then, and then,” my imagination was back in force, “if the market turns bad and we have to declare bankruptcy, I’ll have nothing, so it could be that refinishing this stuff will be the only thing standing between me and the local soup kitchen.”

  Brody snickered.

  “And you sit there and laugh,” I groused. “Well, what should I have expected? Compassion? Understanding? Respect? That’s it. The problem is respect. Men choke when it comes to giving it to a woman, because maybe, just maybe, it means she’s stronger than he is, and that is so threatening he can’t bear it, but it’s the truth. Women are stronger. We create and construct and accommodate, and look at the world with wider eyes than men do. We keep trying harder, because it isn’t an ego thing for us. It’s survival. And necessity. And good common sense. Good God, it’s amazing, men have always let me down.”

  “Not me.”

  “Yes, you,” I shouted, because it felt good to shout.

  Brody sat up and leaned forward, all innocence. “What did I do?”

  “You hugged me. Right there at the window, in full view of anyone who was outside. Didn’t it occur to you someone might be watching?”

  “Frankly, no.”

  “Well, it should have.”

  “If you knew, why didn’t you warn me?”

  “Because I was upset. And besides, I’m a woman. Women trust people. Women give people the benefit of the doubt, rather than assuming the worst. It didn’t occur to me that someone was out there. But you’re a man. You should have known what Dennis was capable of.”

  I heard the creak of Brody’s chair.

  “Don’t come near me,” I said against my knees. “I want to be alone.”

  “I don’t believe you. I think you want to let off steam, and you have every right, but I’d rather be sitting beside you, than opposite you when you do it.”

  “Don’t sit here,” I warned as he lowered himself to the sofa. I straightened my legs and pressed the soles of my feet against his thighs to keep him at that distance at least, but with an easy scoop he had my feet in his lap. “Brody,” I protested.

  “I’ve never heard you like this. A new Claire.”

  “I’m human,” I grumbled. “I have fears and vulnerabilities, just like the rest of the world. I bleed when I’m slashed, and I hurt when I’m kicked. If I want to spit and yell, I will. Damn it, if anyone has a right, I do. I’ve been royally fucked over.”

  It wasn’t until he began rubbing my feet that I realized how cold they were, and then something about the warmth of his hands, something about his presence, even his amusement, because it held such affection, got to me. Absurdly, I started to cry.

  When he pulled on my legs to draw me closer, I kicked out against him, but with that small movement went the last of my anger. I didn’t fight when he pulled a second time, first my legs, then my arms, until he had me turned and drawn to his chest.

  I cried for a long time, belly-deep sobs that gradually shallowed and slowed, lulled by the motion of his hand on my shoulder, my back, beneath my hair. In time the tears stopped, but I didn’t move away. I was too tired, and he felt too good against my battered psyche.

  “Oh Brod
y,” I sniffled a whisper at one point, “I don’t know what to do. I have never felt so helpless in my entire life.”

  If he answered, I didn’t hear, because within seconds, the strain I’d been under and sheer exhaustion combined with the security he offered and his warmth put me to sleep.

  When I awoke, we were sprawled on the sofa with our arms and legs entwined, my head on his chest, and his heart beating too fast by my ear. I knew right away that something was different, and it wasn’t just that runaway heartbeat. It might have been the way my hand was splayed over his ribs, or the way his arm held me to him. More likely it was our lower bodies. My thigh lay over his, high up, over an erection that was as impressive as it was startling.

  I drew my leg back, pushed myself up, and looked down at him. His eyes were wide open, clear as day, though the moon was lower and dimmer. He didn’t speak, nor did I. Nor did either of us move. Shock, I told myself. Embarrassment, I told myself. But there was intrigue, too, because I liked the way he felt and wanted to feel more.

  That was when I knew I was in trouble.

  eight

  Early Tuesday morning, I called the house. Dennis picked up the phone after a single ring, said that he was in the middle of making breakfast, didn’t I have any maple syrup in the house, and I’d have to call the kids later. When I asked if they were still upset, he said they weren’t and hung up the phone. I thought of calling back, then thought better of it. I was furious that he had hung up on me, and feared I would say something I would regret. Better, I decided, to have Carmen take up the issue of phone calls with Art Heuber.

  Next, I called my mother. She sounded frail and discouraged. No, she wasn’t hungry for breakfast. No, she didn’t want to watch the Today show. No, she wasn’t interested in having someone wheel her to the solarium. When I suggested that we talk more when she was feeling better, she perked up and asked me about work. I gave her a preview of the sales meeting I was leading that morning in our Essex store, told her about the line I was introducing to our staff, and the sales rep I was bringing along to speak. I kept an eye on the clock, not for the sake of the meeting, as much as for the sake of the third call I wanted to make.