“I will,” I said.
She sniffed again, then patted her hand against my chest a couple of times. “I need to get to work on dinner.”
“Why don’t you let me do it.”
“I need to keep busy.”
“I’ll do some hot dogs on the grill, you make a fruit salad.”
“Dani needs something easy to swallow. Tomato soup okay?”
“With grilled cheese? Sure.”
She nodded and pulled away a couple of inches, but she didn’t let go of me yet. “I didn’t mean to sound angry,” she said. “I mean I was but . . . mostly I’m just scared to death.”
“You don’t have to be,” I told her. “Worse comes to worst, I can always go back in the Army.”
“Oh no you don’t,” she said. “This is our home. You’re not leaving it again and neither are we.”
“All right, boss,” I told her. “I’m here to stay.”
You probably think I’m taking a long time getting around to the important stuff, don’t you? Thing is, every time I sit down here in the middle of the night and start typing, I remember more. And it all seems important to me. Sometimes I even get a little bit lost in remembering. But that’s not really a bad thing, is it?
Anyway, to get back to where I left off last time. That night in bed, I felt a strange tension between Cindy and me. I thought at first it was all coming from me, because there were things I still hadn’t told her and couldn’t figure out whether to or not. And I only felt worse about it when she started touching me, letting me know she wanted to make love. It was the kind of touching she does when she is sad or worried, face-touching I call it, as opposed to the kind when she wants sex and goes straight for the lower hemisphere. The face-touching starts out with nuzzling, and with her fingertips tracing all the contours of my face as if she’s blind and can only see me by touch. It took me a couple of years with her to realize what that kind of touching means, but once I did, I always found it a lot more arousing than her more direct approach, and I would get hard in an instant.
The face-touching meant she wanted me to take charge but in a slow, gentle way, taking my time and giving some close attention to her own face, her lips and ears and neck, light touches and kisses part by part until I would gradually slide down with the lower half of my body hanging off the foot of the bed. These were the only times she liked me to do that to her, which also accounts for why I would typically get hard the moment I saw what kind of night it was going to be.
Usually nights like that were a kind of torture for me, but crazy good at the same time. On those nights she required a lot of slow attention to get where she wanted to be, while all the time I’m like a trigger that’s one millimeter from being tripped. Sometimes I would even have to distract myself to keep my body in check, so I would keep reminding myself, no sudden movements, boy. I couldn’t even touch myself for fear of going off like a firecracker, at least not until I’d feel the ripples start on the inside of her thigh.
That moment was always one of the most arousing things for me. Her hands on the top of my head would tell me to keep doing what I was doing, and then she would grab two fistfuls of hair and pull on me and say “Now baby, now baby,” and I would slide up on top of her and inside her and suddenly both of us would be tumbling like meteors down through the sweetest, deepest darkness we’d ever felt.
It makes me a little uncomfortable to talk about this part of our life, but you were always the only one I could talk about it with, Spence. And it never seemed to make you the least bit uncomfortable then, so I’m sure it doesn’t now either. I only bring it up because of how different it was for us that night after she found out I was losing my job.
I did everything that night I usually do, but it wasn’t getting her anywhere. So after a while she kind of sighed and said, “That’s enough, baby.” And immediately everything in me went flat too. Getting her off is as enjoyable for me as getting myself off, and I always felt guilty if I came and she didn’t. She wanted to take care of me, of course, and she slipped her hand between my legs to get started. But then she pulled back and said, “You too?”
“I guess we’re both too tense tonight,” I told her.
“Just hold me then. Sometimes that’s the best thing anyway.”
So I held her and kept trying to come up with a single good reason to tell her about the money. But the only reason I could find was that we were married and had agreed to always be 100 percent honest with each other. Still, that reason didn’t seem to outweigh the consequences of involving her in the stupid decision I’d made.
In the end I tried to make myself feel a little better by bringing up the other bit of news.
“Did you talk to your mother today?” I asked.
“No. Why?”
“You didn’t call her while you were at work?”
“I haven’t talked to her in three or four days.”
“She came by the house today.”
“She did? When was this?”
“Somewhere around two o’clock, I guess.”
“What did she want?”
“She said she came to see how Dani was doing. Apparently she knew about the sore throat, knew that we were home for the day.”
She pulled away from me and half sat up. “How would she know that?”
“All I can figure is that she talked to Dr. Sherry today.”
“Oh. Yeah, probably. Though there’s that one receptionist who works there . . .”
“Toni? The one with red hair. That’s who was there today.”
“Toni, yeah. I think they used to hang out together. Maybe still do.”
“Okay, then. Mystery solved.”
She laid back down beside me then, but only for a few seconds. “The girls didn’t say a word about seeing her today.”
“They were asleep in the tent.”
“The whole time?”
I blew out a breath. “She brought your father along. I wouldn’t let him into the house. So your mother didn’t stay all that long.”
“Oh God,” she said. “Damn her! Damn damn damn damn damn—”
I rolled up close and held her face against my chest, telling her “Shhh, shhh,” until she quieted down and lay still. But her stillness was as hard as stone, so I kept my arms around her and bundled her up against me.
It was maybe ten minutes or so before the anger drained out of her and she started sobbing. I kept doing what I was doing, which was the only thing I knew to do. And when she stopped sobbing there wasn’t anything left in her but a hoarse and miserable sadness that broke my heart in two.
“Everything is falling apart for us,” she said.
I said, “No it’s not, baby. I will never let that happen.”
“You promise?” she said. “Will you promise me that?”