Читать книгу Hanging by a Thread - Karen Templeton - Страница 11

“Jesus, Ellie!” Luke winces, letting me go. “You trying to deafen me or what?”

“What did you expect, skulking in the shadows like that! I nearly peed my pants—!” My eyes go wide. “Were you following me?”

“No, numbskull, I was following my wife—”

“Who is out there, please?” heralds a delicate, musical voice from several houses away. We glance up to see a tiny silhouette standing on her top step, haloed by a yellowish light. “Ellie Levine? Is that you?”

“Yeah, Mrs. Patel,” I say, moving closer so she can see me, shielding my eyes from flamingo spotlights. “It’s me. And Luke.”

“Luke? My goodness, you two gave me a fright!”

“Sorry, Mrs. P.,” Luke calls out. “I just startled her, I guess. It’s okay.”

The woman shuffles back inside her front door as Luke grabs my arms and crosses the street, making me hotfoot it beside him. Like all the Scardinares, Luke’s not particularly tall—maybe five-eight—but he’s built like Fort Knox and he’s got a grip like iron. Especially when he’s pissed. Which is my guess, at the moment.

“Where’re we going?”

“Back to your place. I’m freezing my ass off out here. What’s in the box?”

“Tina brought me éclairs. You’re getting Napoleons. Which she expects you to be home for when she gets there,” I point out. The cold has exponentially expanded the Coke in my bladder, my urgent need to pee distracting me from the potentially disastrous track this conversation could take if I’m not careful. Not that I have any intention of blabbing her secret, but Luke has been able to see inside my brain before we were potty trained.

Maybe I shouldn’t think about potties right now.

“So if you knew where we were,” I say, “why didn’t you just come inside?”

He snorts. “Like she’d be real happy to know I followed her, for one thing. And like it would’ve done any good, for another. I figure I’ve got a much better chance worming the truth out of you—hey!”

I may be short, but these thunder thighs come in handy for sudden stops.

“And if that’s what you really think, buster—” I say, peering up at him from underneath the slouched beret, my arms crossed—sorta, this coat is kind of bulky “—you can just haul your butt right back home.”

He gives me one of his sullen, hooded looks, shakes his head and turns back around, continuing down the block. I wrap my scarf more tightly around my neck and trudge after him. When we get to my steps, he stops, his breath puffing in front of his face.

“Can I come in?”

“I told you, I’m not—”

His gaze slams into mine, knocking my breath on its butt.

“And maybe I just need to talk, okay? To somebody who might actually listen. But who won’t go nuts on me, either.”

I’m starving, PMSing and my best friend has just dumped a secret on me I have no idea what to do with. He’s assuming a lot here.

“Fine,” I say, pushing past him and on up the stairs, wondering just how long I’d hold up in an interrogation type situation.

Guess I’m about to find out.

Funny. Luke and I talk probably two or three times a week, but I’m just now realizing we haven’t been alone together since before he and Tina got married. Not really a conscious decision, I don’t think, as just something we naturally fell into, considering the situation. No sense giving tongues a reason to wag and all that. So it’s been a long time since Luke’s been in my kitchen without Tina being there, too. The last time being…gee, I guess not too long after I realized I was pregnant.

I open the fridge to get the brisket; he reaches around me to get a bottle of grape juice, his arm grazing my shoulder. I smell the cold on him, his aftershave, the residue scent from his leather jacket, which he’s draped across the back of the kitchen chair just like he has for the past ten years. He smells like a man, not the hot, sweaty boy who used to pin me down and tickle me mercilessly when we were kids.

We separate, him to find a glass, me to thunk the foil covered pan onto the counter. I slice brisket as he pours—glug, glug, glug—while Mario boops and beeps from the living room. My grandfather didn’t seem particularly surprised to see Luke, but I’m sure I’ll get the third degree later.

I steal a glance at Luke as I plop three slices of brisket on a plate. He’s wearing a thermal Henley and snug jeans, worn Adidas, muscles I still can’t quite believe are there (he was pathetically scrawny as a kid). He keeps his dark hair short these days, hugging his scalp. I get the impression he thinks it makes him look tougher. Maybe it does, I don’t know. The planes of his face do seem sharper, though. Although the long, black lashes kinda kill the effect.

Intense, dark eyes meet mine; one brow lifts. Heat rising in my face, I duck back into the fridge for leftover peas, noodles, thinking I can’t remember the last time I had a man in my kitchen. Had a man standing in my kitchen. That there was a man standing in my…oh, never mind.

I don’t get out much, can you tell?

Silence blankets the room, more pungent than the aroma of rewarmed brisket. Luke sips his juice, watching me, as I remove my delayed dinner from the microwave, carry it to the table in the pumpkin-orange kitchen I keep threatening to repaint, one of these days. I hear Luke’s glass clunk onto the counter, our unspoken thoughts stretching between us like tightropes neither of us dares to cross.

“You’re uncomfortable,” he says softly.

“A little, maybe.”

“Me, too.”

I carefully cut my meat, fork in a bite, chew, swallow. I’m too hungry to not eat, even though I don’t really want to. This weird, three-way friendship between him and Tina and me is based, if nothing else, on our being able to trust each other implicitly. That confidences are inviolate. We only have one rule—that the only secrets we keep from each other are those that would do more harm than good to reveal.

A rule I find I like less and less as time goes on.

“So you’re really not gonna tell me what she said.”

I get up to get a glass of milk. “I’m really not.”

“Okay, then how’s about I tell you how things look from my perspective, and you can just nod if I’m getting warm.” I return to the table with my milk, which I nearly spill when he says, “She wants out of the marriage, doesn’t she?”

“What? No! Ohmigod, Luke—” I crash into my chair. “Where on earth is this coming from—?”

Leo ambles into the kitchen, gives me a hard look. “You okay? I thought I heard you scream.”

“That was hardly a scream, Leo, sheesh.” But he’s already spotted the Oxford box. “What’s in there?”

“Éclairs. Take one.”

He undoes the box, grinning at me and winking at Luke. “Then make myself scarce, right?”

“That’ll do.”

Chuckling, he gets a plate down from the cupboard, lifts out one of the éclairs. He nods his head in my direction but says to Luke, “You think she looks run-down?”

“Leo, for God’s sake—”

“Yeah,” Luke says, eyeing me. “I do.”

“See…” My grandfather licks his fingers as he looks at me. “He agrees with me, you’re working too hard.”

This would be an opportune moment to point out I probably wouldn’t look so run down if everybody would a) give me a chance to get dinner at dinnertime and b) leave me the hell alone and stop looking to me as their own private Ann Landers or whichever one it is that’s still alive. But I’m too damned tired to go there.

While Pops takes foreeeeever to get a glass of milk, he and Luke talk about his work, local politics, some firehouse that had to be gutted because rats had taken it over, the Knicks. I eat and silently seethe, two things I’m extremely good at. After about five thousand years, my grandfather finally carts éclair and milk back out into the living room and I realize I have no idea how to get the conversation going again. Or even if I want to.

I get up to put my plate in the dishwasher; Luke says, “He’s right, you look beat. And I’m slime for bein’ so caught up in my own crap I didn’t stop and think how tired you might be—”

“Oh, please. When have any of us ever been too tired to help each other?”

He gets a funny look on his face. “You sure?”

“No. And if you expect advice, fuggedaboutit.” I dig an éclair out of the box, not bothering with a plate. “But I can listen. And I really want to know why you think Tina wants out.”

The muscles tense in his face. “Because things have been strange between us for a while now.”

“How long?”

“I dunno. Months. A year, maybe.”

I nearly choke. A year? How did I miss that?

“Yeah,” he says. “I don’t understand it, either, we always got along so good. I mean, you and me, we always fought, got on each other’s nerves, right?” Our gazes bounce off each other before he looks away. “But not Tina and me. I mean, the way she’d look at me…like I was her hero, y’know?”

Yeah. I know. Because he was. Because he was the big strong protector and she’d been the damsel in distress for as long as any of us could remember. But it worked both ways, because Tina’s wide-eyed worship fed Luke’s ego like no other. Nobody had ever needed him the way Tina did, and nobody had ever made her feel as safe as Luke did. In other words, they were the perfect match.

“But now,” he continues, “I dunno, it’s like we don’t even have anything to say to each other anymore. I come home, we eat dinner, we watch TV, we go to bed. We have sex—occasionally—but I’m not sure why we’re bothering, to tell you the truth.” His eyes lift to mine, dark with hurt and confusion. “I’m scared for her, El, that she’s gonna fall apart again, like she did that one time in high school. I’m not stupid, I know something’s bothering her. But why won’t she talk to me?”

In silence, I finish off the éclair, wishing there were about six more. Both because I need something to keep my mouth occupied and because my mood’s just swung dangerously close to self-destructive. I don’t know whether it’s because I’m tired, or my hormones are being punks, or what, but once again, my reaction surprises me.

It’s not that I don’t feel for him, or Tina, because I do. My closest friends are both hurting, for godssake. Who else are they gonna come to if not me? Because that’s the way it’s always been. Except for one time, when I found out I was pregnant with Starr, I’ve always been the one the other two turned to to fix things between them. And up until this moment, I was fine with that, maybe because their needing me made me feel a real part of something. But now…

Now I realize just how long I’ve actually only been on the outside looking in, living vicariously through somebody else’s relationship.

How screwed up is that?

So now, even as my mouth performs its appointed task as Duenna to the Deluded, my brain is desperately trying to scratch out of the kennel I’ve kept it in for the past twenty-something years. While I’ve been doing all this repair work for their lives, my own has fallen to rack and ruin.

What the hell does any of this have to do with me? I want to scream.

But I keep all this under wraps because Luke looks so miserable.

“No comment?” he says.

Great. If I plead the Fifth, he’ll take that as a confirmation of his suspicions. If I reassure him Tina never said anything about their marriage being on the rocks, either he’ll think I’m lying or he’ll start wondering what she did want to talk to me about. Talk about your no-win situation. While all this is rumbling around in my head, however, Luke says, “I just wish I knew what was going on, if she’s afraid to talk to me because of what she went through as a kid, if she can’t stand the thought of the marriage failing…”

He yanks out a chair and drops into it, apparently out of steam. But I can tell, it’s not Tina who’s afraid of the marriage failing. I get a flash of their wedding day, both of them grinning like idiots, Tina as pretty as I’ve ever seen her in a dress I knocked off from a picture of some six-thousand-dollar number in Modern Bride. With the exception of two or three brief separations, they’d been going together for nearly nine years by that point. They were so comfortable together, finishing each other’s sentences like an old married couple. Like Luke, I don’t get it.

“Hey,” I say lamely. “Everybody goes through rough patches.”

His expression breaks my heart, because he knows this is more than a rough patch. Then he suddenly glances over my shoulder, the worry etched in his brow evaporating in an instant. “Hey, Twink! Your mom said you were asleep.”

My daughter’s already in his lap, her skinny arms wrapped around his neck. Next to Leo and me, Luke’s her favorite person in the world. And I think I often slip to second place. Maybe third. Not that she doesn’t have positive male role models coming out of her ears—my grandfather, the legion of Scardinare males. Even Mickey Gomez, one of the tenants, who’s been teaching her Spanish. But her relationship with Luke has always been special, a relationship that’s worked both ways. Oh, yeah, Luke’s taken his “uncle” duties very seriously, even from before Starr was born.

I let her have her éclair, which I cut into bite-size pieces so most of the chocolate and custard lands in her mouth instead of on her face, thinking saccharine thoughts about not being able to imagine my life without her. Trust me, I don’t always feel this way, so I’m going with the moment because it makes me feel good about myself. Like I deserve her.

Luke listens carefully as she prattles on about her day, her yawns getting bigger and bigger as her eyelids droop lower and lower. Finally, chuckling, he stands, Starr clinging to him like a little sedated monkey, and carries her upstairs to put her back to bed. I don’t follow, because I know seeing him with her is only going to get my thoughts churning again about his being denied the one thing he really wants.

But you know, nobody forced him to marry Tina. And she’s right: he did know going in she didn’t want kids.

His decision, I tell myself. His consequences to deal with.

“Man, she’s getting so big,” he says when he comes back downstairs.

“Yep. Give ’em food and water and damned if they don’t grow.”

He smiles, a sad tilt of his lips. “It’s late,” he says, lifting his jacket from the back of the chair. “I should go.”

This time, I don’t stop him. We walk out to the front door; Leo’s gone up to his room, so no eagle ears are listening (I assume) as we stand in the foyer.

“I saw your mother earlier,” I say. “Pete and Heather are finally getting married, huh?”

Another smile, this time a weary one. “Yeah. At least there’s some good news, right?”

I grab his arms, my impetuousness clearly surprising him. Not to mention me. I get another whiff of his scent, and something inside me goes, Huh?

“You and Tina need to talk. Tonight,” I add, ignoring both his scent and the Huh?-ing. “You gotta get all this out in the open, tell her exactly what you’ve told me.” It’s a long shot, but maybe if Luke opens up, Tina will too, absolving me of a responsibility I realize I do not want. “I’m not a marriage counselor, a shrink or a priest, and I’m tired of getting caught in the middle.”

He gives me a hard look and says softly, “Then maybe you shouldn’t’ve put yourself there,” and walks out the door.

What the hell…?

My cell rings, faintly. It takes me five rings to locate it, still in my purse on the kitchen counter.

“Hi,” Tina says in a voice I haven’t heard her use since she was about six.

“Uh…hi?”

I hear a whoosh of cigarette smoke. “Luke’s there, isn’t he?”

“Not anymore. And no, I didn’t say anything.”

“What? Oh…I didn’t think you would.” Surprise peers out from between her words, as though it never crossed her mind that I might. I can’t decide if I’m touched or ticked.

“Teen—you two have got to hash this out. By yourselves.” I give her a second or two to absorb this. “And I think you know that.”

When she next speaks, I can barely hear her. “God, Ellie…I’m so scared.”

“I know you are, sweetie,” I say, as gently as I know how. “Which is why you have to talk to Luke. Trust him, okay? You know he loves you.”

I do not like the silence that greets this observation. So I prod her for the answer I want. “Right?”

“Yeah,” she says at last. “I guess.”

“Tina?”

“What?”

“Promise me you won’t do anything until you’ve talked to him?”

There’s another long pause, during which I can hear smoke being spewed.

“Promise?” I prompt.

“Okay, okay, fine.”

“I mean, I know it’s your body and all that, but—”

“Jesus, I get it, already!” I expect her to hang up, but instead I hear, “Luke’s the best thing that’s ever happened to me, you know? The thought of letting him down…it makes me sick.”

I don’t know what to say to this. Then she says:

“You really think I’d make an okay mother?”

Like I know what kind of mother she’d make. But I inject a bright note into my voice and say, “Hey. If I can do this, anybody can—”

“Crap, I hear Luke’s key in the door, I gotta go. I’ll call you tomorrow, ’kay?”

I click off my phone and toss it back in my purse, thinking, man, I am so glad I’m not in her shoes right now.

Especially since I’m not sure I’m doing such a hot job staying balanced in my own.

“So what’s up with Luke and Tina?”

Frances’s low, furtive voice ploughs into me when I emerge from her downstairs bathroom the following Sunday. Thank God I already peed. But I look Luke’s mother straight in the eye and say with remarkable aplomb, “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

Like that works. Knowing nobody will hear my screams for mercy over the din of Scardinares yakking away in the dining room—half the Italians left in Richmond Hill are in this house right now—Frances drags me into her home office and shuts the door, leaning against it for good measure. Underneath artfully tousled hair, bittersweet chocolate eyes bore into mine. A look I know is responsible for hundreds, if not thousands, of impassioned promises over the years to never do again whatever it was that provoked the look to begin with.

“I know Tina,” she says with the exasperated affection of a woman who loves more than understands her daughter-in-law. And who, like everybody else, wanted nothing more than to see Tina finally get a fair shake, to really be happy. She’s hugging herself over a velour tunic free of any signs of having even been in a kitchen today. That would be because Jimmy Sr., not Frances, does all the major cooking. He says it relaxes him. Frankly, I think it was that or starve to death. “Since when does she miss the first viewing of an engagement ring?”

I tell myself that since I’m not her child, I am impervious to The Look. “Maybe one of them’s not feeling well?”

“So they’d call.” Her eyes narrow; my resistance dissolves like an ice cube in a frying pan. “You know something, I can tell you do. Luke’s always talked to you more than anybody else, ever since you were kids.”

You remember what I said about not lying if I can possibly help it? This isn’t due to an overabundance of moral fiber on my part, it’s because I totally suck at it. My mouth goes dry; my cheeks flame. Then I realize that, since I haven’t heard from either Luke or Tina since the other night, anyway, whatever information I might be able to dispense is already outdated. Right?

“Sorry, Frances. I honest to God have no idea what’s going on.”

“Which I suppose is why your cheeks are the color of Jimmy’s marinara sauce.”

“It’s hot in here?”

The question mark at the end probably wasn’t very bright. But before she can move in for the kill, somebody knocks on the door. It’s Jason, looking particularly fetching tonight in several layers of shredded black T-shirts, torn jeans, and rampant despondency. He looks at me, his mouth struggling with the effort to smile. Kinda like my belly the one time I tried Pilates.

“Starr’s wonderin’ where you were,” he says to me, then turns to his mother. “And Luke called. Said he was sorry they couldn’t make it, but Tina’s not feeling good.”

“Oh?” Frances perks up like a hound catching a scent; Jason ducks her attempt to brush his hair out of his eyes. “He say what was wrong?”

“Uh-uh.”

“He want me to call back?”

“Dunno.”

“Oh, for God’s sake,” Frances says, but I’m already out of the room to go find my daughter, so my butt is safe.

Until the next day, when Luke calls me at work.

“El! Guess what? I’m freakin’ gonna be a father!”