“Good answer. I’m supposed to put your dreams first always. When is it my turn?”
“How in the hell is anybody supposed to know that you even want a turn, Birdie? You spend your whole life on the sidelines. You want a turn? Then take a chance like the rest of us, step up to the plate, but don’t rain all over me because I have the guts to go after what I want.”
The color faded from her cheeks, and he knew he’d gone too far. With Birdie, you could rant and rave and scream; what you couldn’t do was get too close to the truth.
She took a step back. “I’ll be back. I have to think.”
“No, damn it, stay here and talk to me. Don’t run away.” He knew it wouldn’t do any good, though. She always walked out in the middle of a fight and came back later, calmed down. She couldn’t stand the intensity of her own emotions.
He touched her chin and forced her to look up at him. “Think about this, Birdie. I’ve spent two years in the middle of nowhere. I’ve commuted three hours a day so you could have your dream house. All this time, you’ve known I was dying here. I did that for you.” Then he added softly, “I thought you’d be happy for me.”
She sighed heavily. “Oh, Jack. Of course you did.”
He didn’t know what to say to that. In silence, he watched her walk out of their bedroom. He didn’t bother following her; he knew there was no point. Instead, he went to the window and waited.
Sure enough, a few moments later, he saw her emerge from the porch. She walked across the darkened yard, toward the prow of their property, where an old, weathered fence ran along the cliff’s ragged edge. She stood at the top of the stairs and stared out to sea.
He had no idea what she was thinking. Yet another sign of how far apart they’d drifted.
Finally, she came back into the house. By then, he’d made a fire in the fireplace and put a frozen lasagna into the oven. The house smelled of baking tomatoes and melting cheese.
She hung her down coat on the hall tree in the entry and came into the living room. For an eternity, she stood there, staring at him, her face streaked by dried tears. Very softly, she said, “I suppose we could live in New York again—for a while.”
He pulled her into his arms, swinging her around. “I love you, Birdie.”
“You’d better.”
“It’ll be great this time, you’ll see. No kids to keep you housebound, and no job that keeps me out of town.” He could see that she was skeptical, but also that she wanted to believe it.
“Okay. But I want to rent out this house, not sell it. This isn’t a permanent move. I want that agreed upon, or it’s no deal.”
“Deal.”
“Someday we’ll come back here. We’ll grow old in this house.”
“Agreed.”
“And we’ll live outside of Manhattan. Maybe Westchester County. I’ll start calling realtors on Monday. They should be able to find us a place by summer.”
“I start work on Monday.”
“What?”
“That was the deal. They want the show to air quickly.”
“What in the hell were you thinking?” She pulled away from him. “We can’t move by Monday.”
“They offered me a contract and I signed it, Birdie. With my past, what was I supposed to do—negotiate?”
“You can’t find a decent place to live in New York that quickly. Last time it took us six months.”
“We can use their corporate apartment until we find our own place. I’ll fly back on Sunday. As soon as you get this place closed up, you can come and pick out your dream house. Money’s no object this time.” He smiled. “Come on, Birdie, don’t look so pissed off. This is an adventure.”
“Let me make sure I understand this correctly.” She was speaking slowly, as though she thought he’d gone brain-dead. “You have accepted a job without consulting me, accepted use of a corporate apartment I’ve never seen, arranged for us to move across the country, and, as the cherry on top of this sundae, I get to close up the house by myself.”
She made it sound so bad. It hadn’t seemed that way to him. Hell, they’d done it this way lots of times. “We’ll give it a few years. If we don’t like it, we can always come back.”
She walked toward the window.
He came up behind her, placed his hands on her tensed shoulders, and kissed the back of her neck. “We were happy in New York, remember?”
“No,” she said, “I do not remember being happy in New York.”
He shouldn’t have said that. Bringing up the past was a bad call. “We’ll be happy this time.”
“Will we?” There was a wistful quality to her voice that matched his own deep longings. A subtle hope that a new location could return an old emotion.
“It’s closer to the girls,” he reminded her, knowing it was his best argument. “You could take the train down to see them anytime you wanted.”
“That’s true.”