Читать книгу Mommies Behaving Badly - Roz Bailey - Страница 9

“There he is!” I crowed as my husband walked in the door, looking darkly handsome in his black overcoat, his suit bag slung over one shoulder. “Daddy’s home!”

The children stopped what they were doing and ran to the door amid cries of “Daddy!” “Yay!” and, from Scout: “What did you bring me?”

With a twinge of creaky muscles I pushed myself up from the floor, where I’d been trying to build a tower of Duplos in pink and white, having to beg some blocks from my son, who claimed to need them rattling around in an old shoe box. Kids…They ask you to play with them, then they don’t want to share the damn blocks.

“Look at you all! I swear, you sprouted a few inches in the past week.” Jack kissed the crew, then pulled me close. “Hey, Rubes.” He kissed me on the lips, his gray eyes smokey. My private heaven was in his arms.

“Welcome home,” I said, loving the way I still fit into the crook of his arm. Jack’s five-day trip to visit a few affiliates had stretched out into two weeks when he’d been summoned to Corstar Headquarters in Dallas, simultaneous with Morgan turning up the heat on my getting her the complete manuscript of Chocolate and Lindsay calling to tell me they moved up the deadline for my next romance novel. My “Can Do!” attitude had nearly undone me this time, causing me to get up before dawn to write, then finish off the day at the computer in Dylan’s room, the keyboard clicking away under the dim glow of the monitor. “Am I glad to see you,” I told my husband.

“Oh, yeah?” He grinned. “Single parenting not for you?”

“Mommy lost her marbles!” Scout reported, her gray eyes sparkling studiously. “That’s what she told us. Do you have marbles, Daddy?”

He touched Scout’s shoulder and lowered his voice confidentially. “I lost mine years ago.”

The connection that flickered between them made me grin. When I’d been pregnant with Scout, Jack had come to me to confess that he worried about bonding with the new baby. “I love Becca so much, I just can’t imagine feeling that way about another kid.”

I’d promised him that he’d acquire a unique attraction for Scout, that the capacity for loving was not a finite thing. “I mean, you love a good T-bone steak, but when my mother brings us lobsters back from Maine in the summer, it doesn’t diminish your love for steak, does it?”

“Are we talking kids or entrees?” he’d asked, folding me into his arms for kisses. “You’re nuts, and I love you.”

And I’d been right. When Scout was born, Jack was through the roof with delight once again. And since Scout was a calm, sensible infant who understood the beauty of eighteen hours of sleep a day, our newly acquired parenting skills were more than sufficient. Suddenly, it became my role to school two-year-old Becca in speech and manners while Jack buddied up with Scout. At last, he had a baby of his own, and this one didn’t cry or shriek as if she had a knife in her belly. Mellow, dough-faced Scout was happy to doze off in Jack’s arms while he read the paper, happy to take a ride in the stroller, happy to cruise along with Jack while he ran out for milk or to the car wash.

Six years later, I was glad to see that their bond had only deepened.

“We’ve got your favorite,” I told Jack, who tugged on Becca’s ponytail, “chicken cutlets for dinner.” Simple, breaded chicken breasts was one of the few meals we could all eat and enjoy. Of course, Jack’s mother, Mirabel, would insist on slathering them with tomato sauce—gravy, she called it—and then melted thick slices of Parmesan cheese on the top. And, according to Jack, no one makes gravy like Mamma Mira. I think Mira is still a little horrified at my lack of old-world cooking skills.

“And we made sugar cookies for dessert,” Becca said proudly.

“Sugar cookies!” Jack ran a hand over her cinnamon-colored hair, giving a gentle yank on her loose ponytail. “You know I love those.”

“We’ll help you unpack, and you can show us all your souvenirs from Dallas.” Scout teetered on the stairs, trying to carry up his bag. “Like key chains and cowboy hats…”

“Dylan wants a hat!” He pressed his fingers to the top of his head as he fell up the stairs behind Scout. “My cowboy hat.”

Becca leaned over him, hands on his shoulders. “If Dad got me one, I’ll let you wear it,” she said sweetly.

“No! My hat!”

“No hats this time,” Jack said, stepping over our son gingerly to grab the luggage before it came sliding down the stairs. “But I may have something for you, if you were good for Mommy.”

“Are you kidding?” I grinned. “They were little monsters the whole time you were gone.”

“Mo-om!” the girls moaned, well accustomed to our little joke that played out every time Jack returned from a business trip, which seemed to be a frequent occurrence these days. Part of his job at one of the network television stations in Manhattan was to keep the affiliates happy, which meant traveling to their various cities to wine and dine them. Add on the fact that Jack’s station was headquartered in Dallas, which required a trip to the second biggest state in the union about six times a year, and it meant my husband was a very busy, very scarce man. He loved his job and was well suited to the requisite schmoozing. “The beauty of my job is that I don’t really have to work,” he always said. “I just have to get in lots of face time.” I wholeheartedly supported my sweetie in doing something he loved, but I hated losing him to Dallas and Phoenix, Portland and Detroit.

“Why do you always go away?” Scout asked Jack as she trailed him up the stairs.

“I have to travel for my job,” he said smoothly, though from the dark look he cast over her head I could tell her question cut him deeply.

That night after Jack supervised baths and played a giggling round of “Spank Your Fanny,” a game the girls had fashioned with him out of idle threats, he tucked the girls into bed and joined me on the living room couch where I was snuggled under a fleece blanket, the TV muted as I waited for one of the millions of Law & Order spin-offs to come on. We watched the show together and tried to guess “who done it” before the TV detectives put it all together.

“We saw this one,” Jack said as he picked up my feet and sat down. “Remember? It wasn’t a robbery at the jewelry store, but the clerk’s ex-girlfriend was angry because she found out the ring he gave her was fake.”

“I never saw this one, and thanks for ruining it.”

“Ah, you did, too, Rubes,” he insisted.

“Nah-uh. You must have seen it one night in Dallas.”

“No way. I was here. You saw it.”

“Nope. You were lounging in bed in your boxers, surrounded by silver-domed room service plates and a passel of belly dancers.”

He pulled my heels onto his lap and began one of his expert foot massages. “Make that a squad of cheerleaders and we’re in business.”

I wanted to sling a witty rebuttal back at him, but I’m a sucker for a well-placed thumb in the instep. It was during a picnic dinner in Central Park with friends who’d assembled to see opera at Met in the Park that I’d first learned of Jack Salerno’s skill with foot massage. My friend Gracie moaned and squealed as he caressed her feet. “Get a room,” one of the other guys joked, and I admit, it did seem quite intimate. But since I knew Gracie had a huge crush on someone else on the picnic blanket, I didn’t hesitate and was next in line when Jack finished with her feet.

Although I held back my moans and sighs, I admit that that first massage was nearly orgasmic. I’ve had an exclusive on Jack’s hands ever since…

“Scout’s out,” Jack said. “I told Becca she could read in bed for a few minutes, since she’s not tired.” Becca needed time to unwind, while Scout had an enviable ability to conk out soon after her head hit the pillow.

“Becca should sleep well tonight, now that you’re back.” I had told Jack about our oldest daughter’s tears at night.

“I just feel so scared. Can we leave the light on?” she would ask me, though I’d noticed that the nighttime tears came only when Jack was out of town.

“No tears tonight?” I asked him.

“No tears.” He stared at the TV screen as his thumbs worked the arches of my feet. “I feel bad about that. No kid should be scared at night because her old man is on the road. Sometimes I don’t know why I don’t jump off the old hamster wheel.”

“I know why,” I said. “It’s because the wheel is a fun ride.”

“Maybe, but lately I’ve been thinking about all the things I miss. The girls really do look taller than they were two weeks ago. And Dylan, he’s lost that baby look completely. Those fat red cheeks? Gone. He’s moving from toddler to boy, and I’m missing it.”

I was glad to hear that Jack had noticed Dylan’s growth. Though Jack claimed I was hypersensitive, I didn’t think he paid enough attention to our son. By the time our third child was born, Jack was so caught up in vying for a promotion at work and managing the girls that he dealt with Dylan methodically, without joy or verve. “It’s like your body is here but your mind and spirit are somewhere else,” I’d told Jack one day when Dylan started crawling, the first time he’d made it from the living room to the kitchen. Jack had growled something back, but it was clear he was in denial.

“Our kids are growing up without me, Rubes,” he said.

“You’re just noticing these things because you’ve been away two weeks. That’s a long time, honey.”

“Exactly. And I don’t want to go down as the absentee father.”

I smiled. Maybe he had been listening all those times months ago when I’d complained about his parenting ennui. I pushed the decadent warmth of his hands out of my mind for a second to focus on the conversation. “What are you saying, Jack?”

“There’s a position opening up at Corstar Headquarters. It’d mean a move to Dallas, but there’s almost zero travel involved.”

My smile faded. “Dallas, huh?” I humored him, knowing he hated it there—the warm weather, the oily twang. Texans didn’t appreciate Jack, a wise-cracking New Yorker. “We could do that. Dylan would finally get his cowboy hat. What’s the latest from Dallas, anyway? How are Desiree and Hank and CJ?”

Not that I’d met these people, but I’d heard enough about them from Jack to get a mental picture. CJ was a spunky goofball, Desiree a blonde bimbo with a vacant mind, and Hank was a boyish wisp of a thing who outsold everyone else at the station, maybe every one south of the Mason-Dixon Line.

“Oh, and Tiger. How’s she working out?” Tiger was the new supervisor at Corstar, the parent company that owned the station where Jack worked. Her real name was Terry Anne Muldavia, but her nickname had made her a legend even before her first day of work.

“She should be nicknamed Shark,” Jack said. “She’s got the wide mouth of a predator, the sleepy eyes of a cold-blooded killer. She’s always moving, cruising the halls, swinging her head back and forth in meetings.”

“A charming young lady. It’s a wonder she never married.”

“You should meet her, really get to know the whole Dallas gang,” Jack said, rubbing the back of his neck. “Especially if we’re thinking of moving there.”

“Hardy-har-har.”

“You think I’m kidding? I could leave New York. The greatest city on Earth, the huge, stinking armpit that crushes us in its concrete embrace.”

“Uh-huh.” Dallas to me was no more real than the tourist sites I’d gone to while at a business conference there, back when I’d worked for an insurance consulting firm. My office buddies and I had done the JFK parade route, the Grassy Knoll and sampled just about every froufrou drink the Fairmont had to offer. Dallas was a lame fantasy. No one was going anywhere.

Although I grew up in the burbs of Jersey, Jack was raised here in Bayside, Queens, in a house about ten blocks away. After retirement his parents moved to Florida, but Jack had never roamed much farther than across the East River to Manhattan during a whirlwind period after college when he shared a two-bedroom apartment with three other guys.

I yawned. “Hand me the phone and we’ll get this place on the market. We can start packing during the next commercial.”

“So facetious.” He shook his head. “I don’t know where you get that.”

“I live with the big kahuna of facetious.”

“I sense you’re not taking me seriously.”

“What was your first clue?”

“You don’t think I can leave New York, do you?”

“Honey, you’ve spent most of your life living in a ten-block radius. Being one of the Bayside Boys defines you. Nothing wrong with that.”

“I could leave, you know.” He turned away from me, staring at the television screen. “I’d do it for the kids. To be around for them. I mean, years down the road, do we want them in therapy talking about how their old man was never around? When the girls are sixteen they’ll be dating men in their thirties, searching for a father figure. And Dylan…You know, last time I was home I caught him playing with your blush.”

“My Estée Lauder? I’ve been looking all over for that.”

“Is that the kind of son we’re raising?”

“Blush without foundation? Appalling!”

“Rubes, you know what I’m saying.” He tucked the blanket around my feet and reached for my left hand. “I’ve been thinking about this, really. With my job, and traveling, well, I don’t want to screw the kids up. I could leave New York if it meant something better for the kids, for our family.”

I swallowed back a giggle, trying to take him seriously. “Honey, it’s too late for that. Between the two of us I’m sure we’ve already screwed those kids up for life. Damage done. Moving now isn’t going to change that.” And he was full of shit if he thought he could leave the Big Apple behind. Jack wouldn’t be Jack without his New York persona, and as for me, I couldn’t imagine leaving New York and relocating to some godforsaken place like…Texas. I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes, giving myself a second to imagine driving around in a shiny minivan with a Texas license plate, my skin tanned, fingernails manicured, my kids answering a polite but twangy “yes, ma’am!” when I yelled at them to pick up their dirty clothes. An odd fantasy, but it wasn’t me. Partly because I doubted my kids would ever pick up their clothes; I’d started warning the girls that they’d better pursue big-money careers so they could afford a housecleaning staff. And more to the point, I couldn’t imagine living in a foreign land like Texas or Wyoming. Leaving noisy, cantankerous, pricey New York was out of the question. “Look,” I said, “this place might be a looney bin, but it’s home.”

“Isn’t home anyplace we’re together?” he asked.

“That is just so sweet!” I gushed, squeezing his hand. “Sweet, but I’m not biting.”

He shook his head and sighed. “This is what I get for marrying a woman who’s smarter than I am.”

I moved the tips of my toes along the top of his thigh. “Flattery will get you nowhere. I’m too tired for reunion sex.”

“You can’t be too tired for reunion sex.” He grinned, a winning smile with straight, square teeth that I can only pray our children will inherit when their permanent teeth come in. “That’s against the rules. There’s no crying in baseball, and no calling off reunion sex.”

Reunion sex had begun as one of those spontaneous “Gee, honey, I’m glad to see ya!” things and quickly solidified itself as a ritual. Not to be outdone by make-up sex, birthday sex or your-mom’s-got-the-kids-overnight sex. I was, indeed, glad to have Jack home, but I’d been up late last night dealing with Becca’s tearful insomnia, then Dylan had wrenched me from sleep twice with pain in his jaws that was either teething or a new ear infection or both. “I’d like to, but I feel like my body was hit by a Mack truck,” I said in a fuzzy voice.

“Come on, Rubes. You’re the Can Do! girl.”

“I’m afraid my Can Do! is all done.”

“Maybe I can help.” He separated my legs at the ankles and leaned in between, massaging my inner thighs under the blanket.

I let out a muffled whoop as his hands moved up my legs. “That tickles.” I caught his hands under the blanket, clamping down. “And you know it’s been crazy around here with me trying to finish my book and write more of Chocolate, and Dylan being sick and Oscar going psycho.” I didn’t mention the fact that I’d had to cancel on Gracie twice, how I’d missed seeing Wicked with Harrison when two free tickets landed in his lap. I didn’t mention the pressure I was feeling to get onboard for Christmas. When I wasn’t stressed out it was one of my favorite times of year. I enjoyed all the trimmings, the decorated cookies, the familiar carols, the sparkling lights and packages wrapped in gold with fat bows. The spirit of the season made New Yorkers a little nicer, a little less likely to steal your cab or lunge for that last seat on a subway train. The kids had forced me to pull the boxes of bulbs and lights from the cobwebs of the crawl space in my closet, but we had saved the tree-buying ritual for Jack. “Give me a few days and we can combine it with Under-the-Tree sex. We’ve got to get a tree up, Jack.”

“You can’t combine two events.” He leaned back. “I call foul.”

I felt tempted to reply that right now there was nothing fouler than his wife who hadn’t managed to squeeze a shower into her schedule that morning, but I wanted to defer the mood, not kill it. Tomorrow I would shower and exfoliate. At the moment, nothing could beat the irresistible lure of sliding under the comforter and burrowing my face into my pillow.

“The rain date is tomorrow,” I said, thinking that I’d even slip on that red bustier that Jack so enjoyed peeling off. I pushed off the blanket, slid my feet down to the floor, leaned over and kissed my husband’s beautiful hard jaw. “Good to have you back, Jack. Are you coming to bed?”

He reached for the remote. “I’m still on Texas time. Do you want me to do the morning run?”

Meaning, get up at seven, corral the kids out of bed for breakfast. Pack the girls’ lunches, get them dressed and out the door. Although Jack had spent the entire evening with the kids, the morning run usually belonged to him. “That would be heaven,” I said without a trace of guilt. Hey, I’d been doing the single-parent thing for the past two weeks.

I dragged myself up the stairs, heading for my stash of PM Sleep in the bathroom medicine cabinet and fantasizing about the warm glow of a good solid seven hours. If Dylan woke up, Jack would hear him.

My honey was home; I could dance in a field of poppies. Deedle-deedle-dee!