23
HAL DIDN’T WANT to call his stepmother and beg her to return, not after last night, when he’d essentially kicked her out, saying he could handle the kids on his own. In truth, it had not been only Katie who’d had problems with Ruth, not only Katie who’d wanted to limit the time their children spent in the company of their daddy’s stepmother. Ruth was nothing like the maternal, quintessentially grandmotherish Carli Dunne, Katie’s mother. Ruth was younger and prettier but far more demanding, and at times she seemed unstable. But then Ruth Chase had had a much harder life than Carli Dunne could have imagined.
Hal’s birth mother, Eileen, had died of a cerebral hemorrhage when he was nine years old. Within a year, his father, Pete—like Hal, a San Francisco deputy sheriff—had fallen under Ruth’s spell. She was twenty-five years old then and beautiful. She, too, had lost her first spouse. Widow Ruth and widower Pete had bonded over their shared grief, among other things. Warren had come along a couple years later. But Hal remembered only a few happy family years before tragedy struck again. On a cold and foggy Saturday afternoon, Pete had accidentally killed himself with a lethal cocktail of prescription insomnia medication and alcohol.
Between Pete’s pension and the private life insurance they’d taken out—their previous marriages had taught them both the value of such a policy—the Chases had enough to get by, but for Hal, life with his stepmother after his father’s death was never the same as it had been before. Hal was, after all, the stepson, not the real son, the way Warren was, and he felt the difference keenly. Ruth favored Warren in almost every way, even as the younger son gradually developed into a rather unremarkable slacker of a teenager and a socially awkward young adult.
For a time after he’d left home, Hal had largely dropped out of Ruth’s and Warren’s lives. He’d visit on some holidays and call to check in from time to time, but he lived independently. It never occurred to him that anything he did even mattered to Ruth.
But when he got involved with Katie, things took a turn. Katie came from such a tightly knit family that she couldn’t accept Hal’s estrangement from Ruth and Warren. Family was family, she told him. It was the most important thing. And so they’d reached out, and by the time they got married, Ruth was in a low-key but very real way back in his everyday life.
The sad truth was that this wasn’t always pleasant. Ruth drank too much, and apart from the deaths of two husbands, she had other demons that plagued her. One of her uncles had abused her when she was a child; there had been some unpleasantness with one of her high school teachers. Also, because her two men had died, she had been denied the love and security of a normal home life, which she said was all she’d ever wanted. Although she tried to show her nicest side to Hal and Katie, a fundamentally bitter nature seemed always ready to assert itself.
This was a serious but not insurmountable problem until Ellen was born, when Ruth decided that she needed to play an active role in the rearing of her grandchild. Ruth took to stopping by while Katie was at work, often finding fault with the nanny, and passing along her suggestions for improving Ellen’s life in a steady stream of well-meaning but intrusive suggestions that neither Katie nor Hal particularly agreed with. After Will was born and Katie started staying home, the gatekeeper in her could no longer coexist with her mother-in-law. Katie had very strong ideas about how to raise her children. It was now her full-time job, and she was going to do it her way, which was the right way. Ruth was welcome to come over, as long as she didn’t try to interfere with Katie’s absolute authority on all things related to her kids.
Inevitably, the visits became fewer.
Last week, the Thanksgiving invitations to Ruth and Warren had represented an effort to reach out and reconcile with Hal’s side of the family after he and Katie realized that Ruth hadn’t come by—by invitation or otherwise—in over three months. Katie and Hal didn’t feel a lot of affection for Ruth or Warren, but they were still family, and mending a fence by asking them over for Thanksgiving had been the right and good thing to do.
But in the here and now, Hal was going a little nuts with his kids. He had forgotten how much planning and patience and simple energy they took. Will had gotten up for good at six-thirty this morning after the random three A.M. wake-up, when he’d needed to be calmed down and rocked back to sleep.
Hal was somewhat ashamed to realize that he didn’t know where Will’s diapers were kept anymore, and when he found them, he was shocked to find that Katie had graduated him out of cloth and into Pampers. He finally got them both dressed and at the kitchen table for breakfast; he needed Ellen’s help because he didn’t know what food they both liked and could eat. He pushed a stroller and held Ellen’s hand as they walked down to the nearby playground, but he hadn’t dressed either of them warmly enough, so they came home almost immediately, after which he put a video on the tube and got them settled in front of it. Checking the time, he could not believe that it wasn’t yet nine o’clock. What were they all supposed to do for the rest of the day? And the day after that?
Leaving them in front of the TV, he walked back into the kitchen and saw the accumulated dishes from last night and this morning. A wave of fatigue washed over him, nearly knocking him over.
He gripped the edges on either side of the sink. His heavy head felt as though it hung by the thinnest of threads. He heard Barney the dinosaur singing, and he brought his hands up, covering his face. A minute ticked away and he did not move an inch.
Now, somehow, it was two o’clock. He’d gotten both of them fed lunch and then down for naps, although who knew how long they would sleep? He honestly felt that he might not survive if he didn’t get a nap himself.
He lay on his bed, his mind racing. Maybe he should call Carli. Either she or one of Katie’s sisters could come by and help out for a while. He knew they were suspicious of him, but maybe if he spent a little more time with them, that would pass. But in all, it seemed like too much work at a time when he felt he had almost no energy. Patti occurred to him, though he rejected that idea almost as soon as it appeared. Seeing her even once yesterday—never mind the attraction, which was, if anything, stronger than ever—had been risky enough. If they were seen together in public, it could only be bad. It was already bad enough.
Realizing that sleep wasn’t going to happen anytime soon, he swore at himself, then sat up and swung his legs over the side of his bed. What was he being so stubborn about? He should just call Ruth, and she would be here in no time. They could talk about logistics, maybe try to find a new nanny, some solutions for the long term. He picked up the phone by his bed and punched in her number.
“Of course,” she told him with no hint of recrimination. “I’ll be right over.”
“You’re great. Thank you.”
“I’m not great. I’m your mother. This is what mothers do.”