“But it wasn’t there. I thought maybe I had forgotten where I parked exactly and I retraced my steps for an hour, but it wasn’t there. Finally I called the police, waited for them to arrive and take a statement, then I took the bus back to the office. When I didn’t show up with the car, I had to hand them the police report. They saw where I’d been, knew I didn’t have any business in the French Quarter, and fired me on the spot. I got a call just now when I got home. The car is back, no damage to it either, but they don’t care. They can’t trust me anymore, they say. It wasn’t a good fit.”
They were still standing in the hallway now, her back arched and pressed against him, his hands around her chest. She stood up, wiggled him off of her, sat down again. She figured she had five more minutes. She would get back to those babies on time. After everything he’d taken from her, he wouldn’t take that. He walked to the sofa opposite her and sat too. Then he folded his hands on his lap, bent his head into them and began to weep. She watched him for a while before she got up, then she walked over and rubbed his back with the palm of her hand, up and down, up and down, the way she’d seen her mother rub her father’s so many times over the years. Mama had told her once that Daddy had wanted to be a doctor like Jackie’s grandfather, that he never got over the fact that he didn’t make it happen. No matter how much success your father grabs, he’ll never feel like a man, not all the way, she had said. And that was the way Jackie felt about Terry now, as if the blank look in his eye at this moment preceded this firing, as if he’d lost a part of himself when he started those drugs and it wasn’t a part he could simply restore again.
She shook that thought out of her head.
She told herself to focus on the now.
“I’m sorry, baby,” she said every few minutes. “We’ll get through this,” she’d repeat, but the words came out flat because she wasn’t sure she meant them.
She sat with him a little while longer, as long as she could before the clock struck twelve. If she didn’t get back, she’d be late. She apologized over and over for going, and when she got back to work she called to check in. He said he was fine, but all the while she painted with the babies, pushed them in the hammock and read them The Berenstain Bears’ New Baby, she could only conjure his face, that blank wall of defeat when he’d looked up to watch her leave, that seemed as if it were in the middle of crumbling.
Jackie usually felt nervous before the parent-teacher conferences. It was only her second one; she still hadn’t caught up on the jargon, and once she’d led a conference for five full minutes before she realized she was referencing the wrong child. It wasn’t only that, the parents could be cruel. Last time she’d had to tell a mother her son lacked impulse control, and the woman had filed a complaint against Jackie, said without the proper certification Jackie wasn’t in a position to judge a bathing suit contest.
Now Jackie wished one of these people would, but they were all sweetness and light this evening, praising Jackie for the strides their children had made. “He says please and thank you now every single time,” or “She hasn’t had an accident in weeks.” And Jackie would have carried those compliments with her through the rest of the year, but the words just streamed over her head today. The one thing she needed to be successful at had failed and there was nothing she could do to right it.
As if the day hadn’t dragged on enough, her sister tiptoed into the nursery as the last conference was ending. She snuck into the kitchen, trying to fix a plate without disturbing the meetings, inching the drawers open so they wouldn’t creak, setting the plates down on towels so they wouldn’t clatter. Jackie just ignored her, and when the last parent had gone, she packed her bag, grabbed the baby who’d fallen asleep in Mama’s arms, and headed for the door.
Her sister ran over to her, her heels clacking, and gripped her by the wrist.
“I came over to see you,” she said.
“It’s not a good time, Sybil.”
“Oh.” Her sister stepped back. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you must be tired with the baby and all that. I was just thinking about you this week, since the party and everything, and”—she paused—“I wanted to apologize about everything with Terry.”
Jackie wasn’t too far gone to grasp the enormity of her sister apologizing. Even with everything that had happened that day, she wanted to spread the moment out. “What with Terry?” she asked.
Sybil shook her head, sighed. “Everything,” she said. “I saw you with him the other day, I saw the baby, and it’s obvious that he’s trying, it’s obvious that you’re happy. After everything you’ve been through, you deserve that. The baby deserves a proper family.”
“Oh,” Jackie said, too stunned to think of much else to say. “Well, thank you,” she stammered finally. “That means a lot to me.” She started for the door, then turned back. It wasn’t more of her sister she was wanting, it was that Sybil always possessed such good judgment and maybe her perspective here was something Jackie could inhabit too.
“How can you tell?” she asked. “That it’s real this time?”
Her sister was halfway across the floor near the railroad table Daddy had just built for the toddler classrooms, but she stepped back again.
“Just watching you at the party,” she repeated, shrugging with her head down, seeming uncomfortable in this new role. “For one, he looks great; he looks clean,” she stressed. “I don’t know, Jackie, I was telling Mama, it seems different this time. Some of my clients are lifetime junkies but a few come out of it. They hit bottom and they tell me they’re never going back. Something about the way they say it, the steel in their eyes, makes me believe it. That’s how I felt about Terry the other day.” She paused. “I think you made the right decision.”
Jackie didn’t trust herself to speak, so she nodded and turned away. Her sister reached out and rubbed the baby’s head, then she kissed Jackie on the cheek. Jackie smiled, but she also felt as though she might sob, and she turned fast for the door so her sister couldn’t see her face.
Sybil stopped her again before she reached her car. “Jackie,” she called out. “I had a rough day. Maybe I can come back with you, spend some time with the baby, apologize to Terry. I was going to call, but I think I need to say it face-to-face.”
Jackie didn’t have the energy to decline, and once she was in the car she was glad for the company. Sybil talked the whole way home. She had secured the Taco Bell contract, finally, but now they were trying to give her the runaround on the terms they’d agreed on, the 20 percent of the settlements they had offered had dwindled down to 15. It didn’t matter; she was going to fight them until they came back around, because at the end of the day she didn’t need that job. She’d made plenty enough on her own.