Or any kind of conversation. Markie got a “Hey, Mom” when he arrived home from school and a “Night, Mom” when she called good night down the basement stairs, but most days she didn’t get more than that. Some days she got less—a grunt after school, the sound of thunder on the basement stairs, and a slammed door at the bottom.
The nothing-but-grunts-and-slammed-doors days, she guessed, were the ones when he couldn’t reach his father on the phone. Any failure of Kyle’s to connect was Markie’s fault, in Jesse’s mind, not Kyle’s. There was no “I can’t believe he can’t make time for me, his own son.” It was only “I can’t believe you drove my dad away.” Not that he ever said it out loud, but she could tell.
Sometimes, because he was a good kid who felt guilty when he had been hard on her for too long, she got a full-toothed smile, an offer to zap her plate of pizza for her, a sincere “Thanks, Mom,” for some small thing she had done for him. And then she felt guilty, because she knew he had forced himself to be friendlier than he wanted to be.
It wasn’t that she was one of those moms who made excuses for her kid’s bad behavior. When he bit a girl at daycare when he was two, she didn’t laugh it off and say, “Kids will be kids,” or talk about how he was simply one of those toddlers who “used his mouth to explore.” No, she told the daycare teachers and the little girl’s parents that it was a terrible thing her boy had done. And then she glared at Jesse all the way home, sitting there in his car seat in his matching yellow-and-blue tow-truck shirt and shorts with his chubby flushed cheeks, and she told him he had better not ever do it again.
She didn’t make excuses for her own bad behavior, either, and that was why she didn’t blame her son for saying so little to her before he disappeared into the basement every day after school. Because she knew she was the one who had caused all of this: Jesse’s surliness, his demotion to public school, her crappy claims-review job, the tiny house, and the tinier bank account that didn’t even allow her to run the air-conditioning during the day.
She had caused it all by doing one terrible thing: she had looked the other way.
There had been clues—not for their entire twenty years together, but for the last few. Suddenly, Kyle was always having her sign documents, which he described in terms that were equal parts minimal and vague. “It’s just something for the mortgage. You know, since we’re co-owners.” “It’s a bank form—don’t worry about it.” “It’s for the mutual fund. So they have our signatures.” She might have asked for more details, but he always managed to choose the moment she was racing around the house, searching for her purse and keys, late for work. So she would nod at his opaque explanation, scrawl her name, and rush out the door.
She brought the mail in one day and found a FINAL NOTICE statement from the power company. It was an administrative error on the company’s part, Kyle said. Of course he had paid the bill on time—hadn’t he always? In fact, he expected a follow-up letter soon, apologizing for the screwup. When she asked him about it later, he said he had thrown the written apology away. “Only a petty person would hang on to something like that.” Anytime she went to fetch the mail after that, he had already gotten to it.
These things were odd, sure, and it was true he had always had a propensity to spend too much money, but he had taken care of the finances for almost two decades and nothing had gone wrong, so why would she suddenly start asking questions seventeen years in? As for the women, the simple truth, however lacking in brilliance, was that she didn’t want to be cheated on, so she refused to consider that it might be happening.
Kyle suddenly had a work trip every other week, though he’d had none in years past. He wasn’t at the same company—he never stayed in one place long—but he always held roughly the same position (software sales), and it wasn’t like he was moving to better and better jobs, with ever-increasing salaries and travel budgets. So how was it that his work travel kept becoming more extravagant? Maui one month, the Florida Keys another. There was even talk of Paris. “Too bad Jesse and I can’t tag along.” “Yeah, too bad. But he’s got school and you’ve got work, so I think it’s best if I go alone . . .”
What possesses a woman of above-average intelligence to look the other way and keep her head locked firmly in that direction? To blindly accept, “Don’t worry. I’ve got the bills handled. The investments, too. We’re in great shape,” and to never ask to see the statements? To keep her nose averted so she wouldn’t catch the scent of perfume—a kind she doesn’t wear—on her husband’s suit jacket? Markie could answer for only one such woman, and her answer, one that filled her with shame now that she had acknowledged it, was: appearances.
Every morning she stepped over Kyle’s lipstick-collared shirts on the faux Italian marble of their bathroom floor, walked into the attached garage of their highly leveraged McMansion in their too-expensive subdivision, and slid, blissfully ignorant, into her entry-level (leased) German sedan. She hummed a self-satisfied tune as she made her way several blocks west to her office at the school or, depending on the day, a few subdivisions east to the massive home and sculptured gardens of Headmaster Deacon, where she was the life—and, as the director of development, the hostess—of regular fund-raising luncheons, garden parties, and silent auctions designed to bring more money into the most moneyed private school in their part of the country.
She was the epitome of the kind of parent who was attracted to Saint Mark’s, the kind the school wanted to attract more of: well bred, well dressed. Well matched—Kyle Bryant was a stunning-looking man, and since no one suspected what Markie was trying so hard to ignore about the health of their bank account and their marriage, everyone assumed they were the perfect couple. People wanted to be Kyle and Markie Bryant, and if they couldn’t achieve that, they wanted to be near the Bryants, to have their kids attend the school that threw parties that would include the Bryants. She was living the life her parents lived, the one they so desperately wanted for her. The one they had raised her to believe she wanted for herself.