He had ruined everything for her. If he had just agreed to the annulment when she asked for it, this whole thing would have been over before the baby was born. She and the girls would have moved on; everyone would have moved on. He wouldn’t have even had to pay alimony. But Kyle’s insistence that they talk through every exhausting detail of their non-marriage doomed her plans for escape more completely than anyone could have predicted. He seemed so reasonable. And Martin’s infatuation with the idea of claiming Van and her two adorable girls began to look—to Martin himself—tawdry.
Or was it Kyle’s seeming forgiveness that made their affair look tawdry? When that idea flitted across Van’s consciousness, it really pissed her off; Kyle was in no position to stand in judgment of her. She didn’t fully believe that he had been sneaking off to New York for passionate weekends with his old girlfriend, but you couldn’t tell her that he didn’t lust after Alison in his heart. And Van had sat through enough of those boring Catholic Masses to know that that was a sin too.
She pulled the spray attachment out of its dock at the edge of the sink and rinsed the cauliflower one last time before tossing it into a buttered glass casserole dish and shoving it into the oven. It was so hard to get the girls to eat any vegetables. After years of serving them nothing but whole organic anything, they still complained and whined; all they wanted was pasta, peanut butter, pizza, hot dogs. In the few months of her fleeting happiness, she had let her lover occasionally spoil the girls with these treats—it was so important that they all like each other—and now they were in a constant snit that they couldn’t have that junk all the time. Maggie was already getting a little chunky, although Kyle the pediatrician insisted that she was right where she should be in terms of height and weight. After years of ignoring both girls, Kyle now seemed to think he was the expert on everything.
Speak of the devil. There he was, in the doorway, holding the swaddled baby and looking completely besotted, even though Gabe was as usual colicky and screaming. Kyle didn’t seem to mind; he was more in love with that boy than he had ever been with his own daughters. It was infuriating. Her lover had just evaporated, and she and Kyle had never once spoken of her broken heart, her disappointed dreams. This whole public charade, that the baby was Kyle’s, that was another thing that just happened without any discussion. Even when you’re forced to sit through nobody can even count how many hours of couple’s counseling, the important things never make it to the table. Bouncing the fussy baby on his shoulder, Kyle looked at Van, curious.
“Who was on the phone?” he asked.
“Just some wrong number,” she said. “Oh, give him to me.” She took the baby into the next room to feed him.
After some four days of casual consideration, Van decided to pass along the message. If Alison wanted to come along and cry on her old boyfriend’s shoulder because her mom was in the hospital, why should she care? The whisper of guilt which hovered in the back of her head had begun to bother her. She had no reason to feel guilty. She in fact refused to feel guilty. In regard to Alison she remained blameless. The bitterness of her heart informed her that Alison could not say the same. But her own sense of moral certainty finally insisted that she do the right thing.
“I meant to tell you, your friend Alison called.” This was tossed over her shoulder as Van fetched dinner plates from the kitchen cabinets.
“Alison called?” Kyle’s voice took on a quiver, the slightest of strains. I knew it, Van thought. The girls, at the table, were coloring wildly. They didn’t even look up.
“She’s in town, her mom is in the hospital, she was having some problem. I’m not sure . . . Maggie, come on, sweetie, we’re setting the table now.”
“What did she say?” Kyle asked steadily. “Did she want me to call her?”
Honestly, he was trying so hard to be cool.
“I think she did.”
For the next three hours everyone pretended that everything was normal. Kyle helped feed the girls, then he and Van had dinner, then the baby woke up, and while Van fed him, Kyle did the dishes, and then he took the girls upstairs and gave them a bath, and then he changed the baby and rocked him while Van put the girls to bed. And then, while she took the baby back for his nine o’clock feeding, she looked up at Kyle and smiled with a friendly, helpful encouragement.
“Aren’t you going to call Alison?” she asked. “She sounded like she really needed to talk to you, about her mom. I think she said she was ill.”
“Are you okay with that?”
“Of course! Kyle. I think that you should be allowed to talk to your ex-girlfriend on the phone.” She smiled at him, as if he were being silly. How she was pulling this off, she didn’t know, but it felt good, even virtuous.
“Did she leave a number?”
“Actually, she didn’t,” Van acknowledged. “You probably should try her parents’ house.”
Kyle nodded and reached for the phone by the side of the bed. Yes, okay, you’re going to do it in front of me so you can prove that you don’t have anything to hide, Van thought. But you still know the phone number by heart.
Kyle waited patiently, listening to the burr of the phone ring across town. His wife was sitting on the bed, breastfeeding their baby; his daughters were sleeping down the hall. Alison had called him. He could call her back.