Acts of Contrition (33 page)

I paused, exhaled, and looked him in the eye. He seemed different. He was thinner. His eyes were bloodshot. His cheekbones seemed more angular.

“You don’t look very good,” I said. “Been sleeping?”

“Are you going to let me in?” he asked, nearly dropping the bags of takeout.

I stepped aside and he strode in, placing the bags on the table.

“Have you eaten?” he said, looking around.

“What are you doing here?”

“These are for you.” He handed me the pink roses and I set them on the table.

“Seriously, Landon. What are you doing here?”

“I’ve stayed away,” he said. “I kept my promise, but I just needed to see you. Have I stayed away long enough? Is it okay
that I’m here now? This is for you, too.” He handed me the gold box. I held it awkwardly. “Open it.”

“Landon, you shouldn’t be here.”

“Come on, MM, just open it.”

I slid my finger under the tape on both sides, unraveled the paper and opened the box, revealing a little porcelain statue of St. Francis of Assisi. I had seen it once in a store window and commented on it to Landon.

“Thank you,” I said uneasily.

“Do you remember that day? We were out taking a walk and you saw it in the store window.”

“Yes, Landon. I remember.”

“Do you remember what I said?”

I thought back but didn’t remember him saying anything. “No,” I said. “I don’t.”

“I didn’t say
anything,
” he said. “That’s why you don’t remember. I
never
said anything that mattered. I wanted to. I wanted to tell you that he was my favorite saint. That when I was a kid I prayed to St. Francis every night because my grandmother told me to.
Lord, make me an instrument of your peace. Where there is doubt, faith.
‘He’s your namesake,’ my grandmother would say. You know, Landon Francis. She said he’d look after me. But you didn’t know that because I didn’t tell you. Because I was afraid to tell you. There were all sorts of things I wanted to say to you, but I was afraid.”

“Of what?”

“Of you knowing me too well—
anyone
knowing me too well. My mom was a wreck. She was chronically depressed because my dad left her—left
us
—when I was a kid. Abandoned his wife and three boys to fend for themselves. My mother did her best, but the depression would overtake her sometimes. And there
would be my grandmother. Always a smile on her face. Always a meal on the table. I’ve told you my father left. That you knew. But did you know that I tracked him down a couple of years ago? Flew all the way to Tucson. Found his address and knocked on his door. Thought maybe he’d want to see his big-shot son: lawyer, politician. Know what he said to me? ‘All politicians are crooks. All lawyers are phonies.’ Then he asked if I could spare a few bucks for the old man. That was my male role model. That’s the DNA pulsing through me. I didn’t want you to know all that. That’s why I never said anything. Because the past is bullshit. The future is the only thing that matters. What I can make of myself despite the old man’s blood running through me.”

By then I had sat down. “I can’t believe you went to see your dad and never mentioned it to me.”

“I know, and I’m sorry. I know you want more from me. At least you
wanted
more from me. Maybe you’ve already moved on. But I had to come over and beg you for one more shot. I can do better, Mary. I can be the guy you want me to be.”

“You’re asking to come back?” I wiped my sweaty palms down the length of my pants.

“I’ve got something else to show you,” Landon said. He pulled an envelope from his jacket pocket. I saw my loopy nineteen-year-old cursive scrolled across the middle. “You sent me this letter, after the first time we met. Do you remember?”

I smiled. God, that seemed like a lifetime ago. I was growing old in this relationship. “I remember,” I said. “And I’ve always been hugely embarrassed by it.”

“Why would you be embarrassed by it?”

“Because I was just a kid and you were in law school. And mostly because you never wrote me back. Talk about humiliation.”

“I never wrote you back, but MM, my God, I’ve kept the letter for all these years.”

“Maybe we can burn it.”

Landon smiled. “I’m keeping it forever.”

Our eyes locked on the word
forever,
a promise we’d never before shared.

“Can we eat?” Landon asked. “Do you have plans that I’m interrupting?”

“I just walked in from work,” I said, pointing to my briefcase and purse, which were still unpacked by the door. “My only plans were to change out of this suit and forage for food in my empty refrigerator.”

“Go change,” Landon said. “I’ll get plates and drinks.”

A few minutes later, Landon and I sat around the kitchen table, eating takeout from the Italian deli.

“How’s work?” Landon asked.

“Great!” I said, and then, “I hate it. Kind of. Well, it’s okay. But I don’t love it. We’ll see.”

“Being a first-year associate is kind of rough.”

I thought of Angela, little Shannon and Kelly, their silky waves of hair, their tiny Chiclets teeth, their helium-balloon laughs. I was a twenty-six-year-old woman fighting addiction—not to drugs, not to alcohol, but to peachy little girl skin and kisses as sweet as watermelon. And here I was working sixty hours a week drafting briefs and sharing dinner with my self-admitted commitment-phobic ex-boyfriend.

“You’d better get going,” I said after dinner, before Landon tried to stay for too long and before I let him.

“I’m going,” Landon said, “but Mary, I have one more thing to say and then I’ll put the ball in your court. Let you decide whether you want to see me again.”

My body stiffened as I prepared myself for Landon’s final entreaty. This is when he’ll argue the merits of his case: that there is value in being together
just for the sake of it
. That not everything needs to lead to something different, bigger. That it’s not always better once you get there. I steeled myself to hear his famous refrain: Can’t we just enjoy each other? Can’t that be enough?

But Landon didn’t make that argument. Instead he cupped my face with his palms, looked me straight in the eyes, swallowed hard, and said, “I love you, Mary Margaret Russo. I really love you. Always have. Always will. I’m scared because of my father, how he was. But I’m ready to dive in. I’m ready to go for the whole thing: marriage, kids. You know, the things you want. I want them, too.” Then he kissed me and walked out the door. Hollywood style. Leaving me standing there to consider the terms of his deal, an offer so appealing I wouldn’t need to counter.

CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

The Big Book

JANUARY, FEBRUARY, AND NOW IT’S
March. I’m teaching religious education on Sundays, volunteering at Dom and Danny’s school once a week, and helping out at the girls’ school for various functions: the charity auction, Emily’s next play, Sally’s read-a-thon. I’m also considering taking in some legal work. Basic stuff: wills and trusts, settlements. I’ve talked to Tom about it and he’s already started to help me design a Web site for Mary Morrissey, Attorney at Law. A photo of me in my Trust Me, I’m a Lawyer blue suit, looking stately and serious, like I’ve spent the past decade committing legal precedence to memory, rather than recalling every type of dinosaur and the mnemonic for the order of the planets as well as relearning how to find the least common denominator.

Just as my life is starting to rebuild, Landon—with his impeccable timing—calls.

“Mary, hi,” he says, like he’s just a guy, not a US senator. “How are you?”

I told Tom when Landon called me after the election because I never wanted to lie to him again. Tom nodded, and when he finally spoke, he said, “You told him not to call you, right? He can’t call you again, Mary. You know that, right?” I told him I did, and now here I was, on the phone again with Landon.

“Mary?” Landon says. “Are you there?”

“Listen, Landon, you can’t be calling me. When you call me, it hurts my family.”

“I’ll let you go,” he says. “But I have a request.”

“You’re a senator,” I say. “Don’t you have an entire staff of people to fulfill your requests?”

“I was hoping you could send me a photo of Sally. Maybe her school photo? Maybe you could send me one every year?”

My heart thumps heavily because it’s been almost a year and Landon is still on this. “No way. Forget it.”

“I just want to see her,” he says. “I just want to be able to look at a photo of her every now and then.”

“Aren’t you happy?” I say. “Aren’t you where you want to be?”

“What’s happiness, really?” he asks.

“Landon, I can only imagine all the beautiful, brilliant women fawning all over you. Why don’t you choose one, get married, and have some kids?”

“Yeah,” Landon says with a small laugh.

“I’m serious, Landon. I’m not being smart. I mean it. Why don’t you?”

“Probably because I’m just as incapable of committing now as when we were together. I’m my father’s son in many regards,” Landon says sadly.

“Maybe so,” I say, because after ten years of telling him that he’s not, maybe it’s time to believe that he is.

“Seriously, MM. What do you say? Just one photo?”

“I don’t think it’s a good idea,” I say. “We need to think of Sally. What’s best for her. What if a nosy intern finds the photo in your desk drawer? What if we’re all found out?”

“I’ll keep it at home,” he says. “Will you just think about it?”

“I’ll talk to Tom,” I say. “I’ve got to go, okay?”

The final time I broke up with Landon was the tenth year of our relationship. We had been dating for six years; had known each other four more. The first time I met Landon I was nineteen years old. On that last night, I had just turned twenty-nine. I had done four tours with him, if you counted the times I had fallen off the wagon and climbed back on. I had the battle scars to prove it. I had given my blood and was walking away with a wounded heart.

“This is good-bye,” I said to him on that last Saturday night.

“I don’t blame you,” he said. “I know you deserve more. I know you’re wasting your time with me when I’m not what you want. I’m
sorry
I’m not what you want.” He hung his head low, like his inability to love me as I loved him was a defect he wished he could fix but couldn’t.

“You tried,” I said. Following his plaintive, desperate plea two years earlier—when he’d looked me in the eye and said, “I love you, Mary Margaret Russo. I really love you. Always have. Always will”—his ability to express himself had sprung back to its original elasticity, tight and unyielding. There were times, moments here and there, when Landon would fall hard and dive in with everything he had. “I love you so much,” he’d claim in those moments, but weeks, sometimes months, later he’d pull
back again, and I’d be able to detect by the pull of his mouth and the clench of his jaw how hard it was for him. Opening up to me and staying open only caused him more anxiety, made him feel more exposed, and instead of making him more comfortable in my company, it made him less so. I was patient, thought that maybe his emotional growth would shoot up in fits and starts, but the engine that propelled the original spurt stalled along the way and I was left with a car idling. It was on but going nowhere.

It’s the next week. As the girls sit at the counter with their homework and the boys with their coloring, I cook corned beef with cabbage, a giant pot of mashed potatoes, and a crusty loaf of Irish soda bread. When it’s time for dinner, I call the kids and Tom to the table. I serve Tom a heaping helping, fill his wineglass with a deep cabernet.

“What a dinner,” Tom says. “I love St. Patrick’s Day.”

“I know you do,” I say, bending down to kiss the top of his head. “I just thought it would be nice.”

After dinner I clean the kitchen while Tom helps the boys get ready for bed. I hear him chasing them with their toothbrushes, stomping his monster feet and roaring, “ ‘Fee-fi-fo-fum, I smell the blood of an Englishman!’ ” The boys squeal and run for cover under blankets and pillows.

I turn on the dishwasher, start a load of laundry, and fold what’s in the dryer while Sally and Emily finish up their math and spelling homework. One of Emily’s vocabulary words is
quandary,
which means “a perplexing situation or position; a dilemma.” She needs to use the word in a sentence but is having a hard time. Each of her attempts has to do with being in a quandary
and trying to get out. I want to tell her the best quandary to be in is no quandary at all. Jump, kick, swerve, I want to say, but get out of the way of a situation that will roll you into a knot that cannot be undone. Trust me, I want to tell her, I’m the expert when it comes to quandaries.