“Well, then,” Clayton said, and he started to ask Markie about extending the lease on the bungalow, since his grandson clearly loved his new job next door and was obviously benefiting from it. She was saved by her mother, who interrupted to ask Jesse about his schoolwork, and thus relieved, Markie took the opportunity to slip out of the camera frame.
“I’ve got a history test tomorrow, actually,” Jesse said, “so I’d better go. I’ll see if Mom . . .” He glanced over the laptop screen to find Markie making an X with her forearms and shaking her head. “Right,” he said, “so . . . that test. I’d better get back to my books. We’ll talk to you next week, okay?”
Not half an hour later, Markie was reviewing files at the dining room table when Jesse and Angel came thundering up the basement stairs. She asked how the studying was going, and he announced he was finished.
“Is Lola rubbing off on you, rather than the other way around?” she asked. “You usually spend hours preparing for tests. Especially history.”
“Yeah, but it’s World War Two.”
“And?”
“And Frédéric was alive during World War Two. He was a kid, but he, like, totally lived through it. I mentioned I had a test on it tomorrow, and every minute we weren’t talking about how to rebuild the fence, he was telling me about the war. Didn’t I tell you that? I thought I did. Then again, I was a little delirious when I got home. I just drank three glasses of water in the basement bathroom! Anyway, I looked over my notes from class, and there’s pretty much nothing that’ll be on the test that Frédéric and I didn’t talk about.”
How wonderful it would be if he were this animated every time he came back from helping Frédéric, she thought, and then quickly she told herself not to get carried away. This was Jesse she was dealing with: as much as he had obviously loved his time with the older man, he could just as easily return home livid the following week and storm down to his room, ignoring her for the rest of the evening. Today could be as good as it got.
Seize the opportunity, she told herself. Find a way to continue what he’s started. An entire evening of talking and laughing together would be such a treat! “Hey,” she called, “you want to see if there’s something on TV?”
Jesse said something, but she couldn’t hear, so she stood and followed him to the kitchen. He was bent over the counter, inhaling another piece of lasagna.
“I didn’t hear what you—” she started before she noticed the cell phone bolted to his ear.
He held up a finger. “Hold on a sec, Trev.” He looked up at her impatiently.
“I was asking if you wanted to find a show or something,” she said.
He smiled at her as though she were the ungainly girl with a back brace, he the quarterback, and she had just asked him to the homecoming dance, and he shook his head. As she walked back to the dining room and plunked down in her chair, dejected, she heard him say, “Sorry about that. So what were you saying?” After a few “Uh-huhs,” she heard his dishes clatter into the sink, his footsteps on the basement stairs, and his bedroom door closing.
Chapter Twenty-One
Markie was savoring the last few sips of her fair-trade coffee. It was the only good cup she’d had in months, the eight-dollar bag of on-sale beans one of the first treats she had allowed herself since Kyle left. After months of store-brand sludge, it tasted like melted heaven, though she could imagine her old friends laughing at the use of “treat” to describe it, her bargain coffee from the endcap display. They wouldn’t have taken a second look as they headed down the aisle for their sixteen-dollar-a-pound bags. But she had allowed herself twenty dollars for “splurge” items at the grocery store, and after committing twelve of those to Jesse’s favorite deli beef jerky, it was the endcap coffee or nothing.
She took another sip and looked at her waist, admiring the way her yoga pants now gaped there. Another few weeks of star-level file review like the two she had just completed, which would mean another few paychecks like the one she had received this week, and she might allow herself a new pair, one size smaller. Angel whined from her crate, and Markie smiled—smiled!—and told the dog she would be with her in a minute.
“Let me just finish this, girl, and then I’ll get my runners on.”
A couple of weeks earlier, after a few more mornings watching Jesse drag himself up from the basement to take the dog out before school, Markie had finally let him off the hook, telling him he could sleep until the last minute on weekdays, and she would take over the morning walks. His homework had started to pile up, and with his Lola-related obligations during the week and his Frédéric-directed ones on the weekends, he had been staying up later and later to get his schoolwork finished. The early walks were killing him. And killing his mood—gone were the mile-a-minute descriptions of the projects he was working on with Frédéric, and back were the grunting and stomping and slamming of doors.
Spending her first two hours of the day walking a dog she never wanted wasn’t Markie’s idea of the good life, but forcing her son to do it at the expense of his health was even less appealing, as was forcing herself to deal with his irritability. And after two weeks, Markie had to admit that the new routine was, in the broken English of their neighbor, “shooting the single bird with the identical bullet”: Jesse was better rested and far more pleasant to be around; Angel was getting enough exercise to keep her quiet the rest of the day, allowing Markie to regain her position as leader of Gregory’s team; and her post-divorce pudge had started to fall away.
She was avoiding her reflection in the mirror less and less. She was getting frequent e-mails from Gregory, congratulating her for her A-player status at Global Insurance. And she was getting regular thank-yous from Jesse, often with the added bonus of a full-on smile or a hug, rewards that, more than her ever-loosening clothes and the attaboys from her boss, kept her motivated to pull on her running shoes and snap on the dog’s leash every morning.
It made her feel guilty, how surprised Jesse seemed that she had been willing to take on this chore for him. “The day we got her, you told me if I couldn’t manage it all by myself, she’d have to go back to the pound,” he said. “And you’re not exactly the kind of mom who makes empty threats.”
One of the things she had gotten from Clayton and Lydia was follow-through. When Jesse was little and she started counting “One . . . two . . . ,” he knew better than to let her reach “three.” Markie wouldn’t have thought twice about whether Clayton and Lydia would have forced her to return a dog in the same situation. Hell yes. But she had thought far more than two times about her own threat, and she assumed Jesse knew that when it came down to it, she would never do something as extreme as that. Did her son believe she was as rigid as her parents?