Things We Didn't Say

Chapter 25

Casey



I need a cigarette.

This will cause Mallory to roll her eyes or worse. I will stink. It will blacken my lungs and yellow my teeth and give me throat cancer.

But I may tear out my throat otherwise. So.

I dread the cold, though the wind appears to have subsided, as the snow is falling still heavy but now more or less straight down instead of sideways.

So I leave Angel to her nap and Jewel and Mallory to their channel flipping on the couch and step out to the front porch, which is more sheltered than the back patio.

I test the cut on my lip with my tongue. It seems to have scabbed over, so that it must look like hell but will probably not split open, if I’m careful.

After several tries to light up, my cig finally catches and I suck in, both loving and hating that pinch in my lungs that comes before the light-headed relief.

I’d promised myself I wouldn’t contact Tony again this weekend, not until I’d had a chance to decide what to do. How much to tell Michael and when. Ideally before Angel decides to let fly with my secrets.

But it’s too much to hold this all in. There aren’t enough cigarettes in the world to make this feel better. I’m a boiling pot with the lid bolted.

So I text him, as it’s safer than calling.

Dylan found. He’s fine. Thx.

Moments later, a return text: PTL—which I recognize as Tony’s texting shorthand for Praise the Lord—what happened?

Ran away. Long story.

Glad he’s OK. U?

SHE is still here. Makes me crazy.

Hang in.

I pause in the texting, finishing the last few drags of the cigarette, deciding what else to say, what I can reasonably type with my thumbs that will sum up everything.

Don’t know if M. still wants me. Want to stay. Hope I can.

Minutes go by with no response. He’s a volunteer firefighter, so he probably got called to a wreck.

I feel better having said it to someone, even though Tony may not have gotten the message yet, even though Tony is a relic from my past, a secret.

We were neighbors during my JinxCorp days. We’d get home at about the same time many nights. He was bartending and operating sound for local bands, so I not only saw him in the hallway in front of my apartment but some nights going out I’d go to his bar. Sometimes I’d see him with a band, fiddling with those knobs and sliding buttons for the budding rock stars who called him Gramps. He called them “A*sholes” and smiled, so they assumed he meant it affectionately. For some of them, that was true.

He would later tell me that my rock-bottom moment was also his.

“You’re young, Edna Leigh,” he told me, when my stitches were itching under the bandage and he’d brought me some stuffed grape leaves and baba ghanoush from Olive Express. “If I did that, I bet I’d be dead, or paralyzed or something. I’m sixty-some, and I’m not made of rubber like you.”

“Ha, I only wish I’d bounced,” I said back, sounding cockier than I really felt.

He quit his bartending gig and gave up working sound. He went to work for his brother, though there’d been bad blood there for the longest time.

The cold finally gets to me. I should also check in with my mom. She never used to be the “checking up” type, but after Billy, everything changed.


In the house, Jewel has fallen asleep in her mother’s lap. Mallory’s asleep, too, her head tipped back on the couch. Not sure why she should be so tired, since she seems to be the only one who slept last night. Rather soundly, in fact. So soundly she couldn’t hear me knocking on the door just a few feet away, when I was locked out.

I prefer privacy for talking to my mother, anyway.

These two halves of my life will have to mesh if we get married, but I find it hard to imagine this.

The phone rings a few times before she picks up.

“Hi, baby,” she says.

“Hi, Mom.”

“How was your day?”

“Ummm . . .”

There are tears, now.

“Honey? What’s wrong?” I hear her clunk a glass down on the table. I imagine her sitting forward in her chair, concern written in the lines on her face, lines put there by me, Dad, Billy.

“It’s okay, now,” I tell her, wiping my face hard, shaking my head. “It’s just been a hard day.”

“Oh, sweetie.”

Her concern does me in.

I do tell her, some of it, anyway, an edited version of events, leaving out most of the stuff about Mallory. She interrupts my story with lots of “Oh, honey” and “Oh, baby,” and commiserating gasps.

Finally she says, “Thank God he’s all right. What happens now?”

I shrug, then remember she can’t see me. “I don’t know. I’ll have to let Michael deal with it, I suppose.”

“You can’t sit on the sidelines forever, if you really are going to marry him. Are you sure you still want to do that?”

“Yes,” I croak out. My throat feels raw.

“Why do you want to put yourself through all this? Edna, honey, you’re so young yet, you can have any kind of boyfriend you want, someone who can afford to pay attention to you, who doesn’t have to spend all his energy on other people, someone without an ex-wife. And don’t you want babies of your own?”

“Of course. And I’m going to, with him.”

“Don’t be so sure.”

“Mom—”

“He’s got teenagers, and he’s what, thirty-five?”

“Thirty-six.”

“I guarantee you he’s reaching the end of his rope with kids, especially after this. Would you be willing to give up ever having a baby of your own, to stay with him? Is he worth that?”

“I can’t talk about this right now.”

“I just don’t want to see you throw away your youth by making your life harder than it has to be. Don’t do it just to win him. This is not some TV show with the guy as the prize.”

“So we’re watching The Bachelor again, are we? Will you give me a break, please? We’ve been through hell, here.”

“I’m so sorry my TV watching isn’t up to your lofty standards.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I thought that’s why you bolted town, to go off and live your dreams. This is what you dreamed of? Teenage stepkids who run away and sneer at you?”

“You make it sound so awful.”

“I’m only repeating what you tell me. Why don’t you call Pete? He misses you. We all do.”

“That’s what this is really about. You don’t like that I left.”

“Of course I don’t. I miss my children.”

I suck in a breath at her phrasing, comparing my absence and Billy’s. “I’m right here, on the phone.”

“And never here where I can see you. Are you eating? You sound thin.”

Despite it all, I have to laugh. “I sound thin?”

My mom laughs, too, and the tension falls away like leaves from an autumn tree.

“I hate to see it so hard for you,” she says, her voice softer, still warm with laughter.

“Life isn’t supposed to be easy. If it were easy, everyone would do it.”

“Smartass.”

“My ass has never been smarter.”

We banter like this for a few more minutes and talk about my cousin’s baby’s party and how it’s been rescheduled because of the storm, and while I keep up the prattle I’m entertaining my mother’s question to me: Would I choose Michael if it meant giving up having babies?

Shortly after Michael proposed, we were up late flipping channels while the kids slept. The fire was lit and the room was dark and the ruddy light danced across his face. I kept turning the ring around and around on my finger.

Steel Magnolias was on. Julia Roberts and Sally Field were fighting over Julia wanting to have a baby, despite her character’s delicate medical condition. Michael was about to flip past, but I took the remote out of his hand.

“I understand that,” I told him. “Wanting to have a baby of her own.”

“Real subtle, Casey,” he said, smirking at me and taking the remote back.

“I was just talking about the movie.” Such a reporter. Always suspecting ulterior motives.

“But you do want to have a baby.” He said this matter-of-factly, flipping to a poker tournament on one of the ESPNs.

I shrugged, trying to act like I could take it or leave it, like he’d asked if I wanted some popcorn. It had taken a lot for Michael to risk getting married again. I feared if I pressured him, he would bolt like a skittish horse.

He playfully nudged me. “C’mon, you have baby radar. If there’s a baby within a mile of you, you’ll find it and start playing peekaboo.”

“I’m practicing for the peekaboo championship.”

“So you don’t want a baby with a broken-down old man like me?”

I was almost afraid to look at him, but I dared it. He was smiling at me softly.

“Well, I guess if you can manage it,” I said.

He kissed my forehead. “I think I’d manage just fine.” He moved on to my neck. “I’ll have a baby with you.”

I shivered with delight as he continued kissing my neck.

Then he said, “It would make a nice change to make a baby with someone not crazy.”

The delicious shivers evaporated, and I moved away from the reach of his lips. He looked at me with a wrinkled brow.

“I think I hear a kid on the steps,” I lied.

I know it was a favorable comparison. I know I should have ignored it and kissed him back. But his ex-wife, his old life, seeped always into our most intimate moments.

And now she’s here. In our house.

I hang up from my mother and return to the fridge to rummage for some dinner. The children will be hungry soon, and life must go on.