A Place of Hiding

She wouldn’t admit to that or to anything. She couldn’t afford to. So she directed them elsewhere. She did it knowing the terrible risk involved, the risk that put her in the position of repeating her mother’s misery: that curse of desertion that seemed to haunt her family. She’d lived her childhood and her girlhood in its shadow and she’d done everything in her power to ensure that she would never have to see the back of a spouse walking away. It had happened to her mother. It had happened to her brother. But she’d sworn it would never happen to her. When we work and strive and sacrifice and love, we are owed devotion in return, she’d believed. She’d had it for years and had it without question. Still, she had to risk losing it in order to give protection where it was now most needed. She readied herself and said, “You miss our boys, don’t you? That’s part of what happened. We did a good job with them, but they’re gone to their own lives and you miss the fathering. That started it. I saw the longing in you the first time those girls of Mary Beth’s were sitting here having their tea.”


She didn’t look at her husband and he didn’t say anything. In any other situation, she could have interpreted his silence as assent and let the rest of the conversation go. But in this situation she could not do so when letting one conversation go ran the risk of another conversation beginning. There were too few safe subjects to choose from at this point, so she chose this one, telling herself they would have come to it eventually. She said, “Isn’t it true, Kev? Isn’t that how everything started?” Despite her deliberate choice of subject, despite the fact that she was making the choice cold-bloodedly as a way to keep that other more terrible knowledge safeguarded forever, she remembered her mother and how it had been for her: the begging and the tears and the do not leave me I will do anything I will be anything I will be her if that’s what you ask of me. She promised herself if it came to that, she would not go the way of her mother.

“Valerie.” Kevin’s voice sounded hoarse. “What’s happened to us?”

“You don’t know?”

“Tell me.”

She looked at him. “Is there an us?”

He appeared so perplexed that for an instant she wanted to stop where they were, as far as they’d gone, so close to the border but still not crossing it. But she could not do that. “What’re you talking about?” he asked.

“Choices,” she said. “Walking away from them when they’re yours to make. Or making them and walking away from others. That’s what’s happened. I’ve been watching it happen. I’ve been looking round it, looking past it, trying not to see it. But it’s there all the same, and you’re right. It’s time we talked.”

“Val, did you tell—”

She stopped him from going in that direction. She said, “Men don’t stray unless there’s a barrenness, Kev.”

“Stray?”

“Somewhere, a barrenness. In what they already have. First I thought, Well he can act like their dad without becoming their dad, can’t he? He can give them what a dad gives his girls and we’ll be all right with that, Kev and me. He can stand in Corey’s place in their lives. He can do that much. It’ll be fine if he does.” She swallowed and wished she didn’t have to say it. But she knew that, like her husband, she had no real choice in the matter. “I thought,” she said, “when I thought about it, Kev: He doesn’t need to do the same for Corey’s wife.”

Kevin said, “Hang on. You’ve been thinking...Mary Beth...me?”

He looked appalled. She would have felt relieved had she not needed to press forward to make sure every other thought was obliterated from his mind save the thought that she had suspected him of falling in love with his brother’s widow. “Isn’t that how it was?” she asked him. “Isn’t that how it is? I want the truth here, Kev. I think I’m owed it.”

“Truth’s what we all want,” Kevin said. “I’m not sure we’re owed it.”

“In a marriage?” she said. “Tell me, Kevin. I want to know what’s going on.”

“Nothing,” he said. “I don’t see how you came to believe something ever was going on.”

“Her girls. Her phoning. Her needing you to do this and that. You being there for her and missing our boys and wanting...I can tell you miss our boys, Kev.”

“Of course I do. I’m their dad. Why wouldn’t I miss them? But that doesn’t mean...Val, I owe Mary Beth what a brother owes to his sister. Nothing more, nothing less. I’d expect you of all people would have understood that. Has that been what this is all about?”

“What?”

“The silence. The secrets. Like you’ve been hiding something from me. You have, haven’t you? Hiding something? You always talk but you’ve stopped lately. When I asked...” He gestured with his hand and then dropped it to his side. “You wouldn’t say. So I thought...” He looked away from her, studying the chicken stock as if it were a potion.

“Thought what?” she asked, because in the end she had to know and he had to speak so that she could deny and in denying put the subject at rest between them.

“First,” he said, “I decided you’d told Henry despite the promise to hold your tongue. I thought Jesus God she’s told her brother about Cyn and she thinks he’s given Brouard the chop and she won’t tell me because I warned her off the idea in the first place. But then I decided it was something else, something worse. Worse for me, that is.”

“What?”