An Amish Christmas (6 page)

The sound of the screen door opening brought her back to the moment. She watched James emerge into the morning air, holding his own mug of coffee. He wore the same clothes from the day before and was unshaved, his hair uncombed. It was obvious that he, too, had passed a sleepless night. She wondered if he was feeling hungover from all that Scotch. She hoped so. The sight of her handsome husband usually had a warming effect on her, a combination of love, attraction, and comfort. All that was over. Today she felt only anger and the stabbing pain of betrayal.

“I saw you through the window,” he said as he drew closer. “What are you doing out here so early?”

She didn’t reply. He sat down on the chair next to her. “Good coffee. Thanks for making it.” He glanced down at her feet. “Aren’t your slippers getting wet out here?”

She looked over at him in disbelief. “Are we
chatting
?”

His voice suddenly reflected his fatigue. “Look, it won’t do us any good to go at each other. We’ll have to work this all out, and we might as well do it as a team.”

“James, we’re not discussing where to go on vacation or whether the kids should take Spanish or French. We’re discussing how you deceived me and what you’ve done to the whole family. We’re talking about whether I’m leaving you.”

He held up a hand and spoke soothingly. “I know you’re angry now, Meg—”

“Don’t patronize me.” Her tone was icy. “I feel like such a fool, being all chipper to try and cheer you up, feeling sorry for
you while you were busy nursing your wounded pride in coffee shops. You know, if we had worked as a ‘team,’ as you put it, when you lost your job,
that
might have been helpful. I never would have let you risk everything we had, no matter how fantastic the deal was.” She stood. “True, you were the one with the high-powered job, the one who made all the money. You were the important one. Nothing I did mattered much. Raising the kids, running our lives—stupid stuff, I guess. Even so, couldn’t you have thrown me a bone? Given me a hint what you were going to do?” She stooped to retrieve her coffee cup. “I’m sorry, but I really can’t bear to look at you another minute. We’ll have to sit down and go over some things later. Like when we have to get out of the house. And where on earth we’re going to go.”

James’s tone was angry. “Don’t twist everything around. I was only trying to spare you and the kids.”

“If things had gone your way, that would have been fine. I’d never have been the wiser. It simply didn’t occur to you that something might go wrong, did it?” She paused. “Maybe having such a high-powered job isn’t always a good thing. The adrenaline of all that risk-taking, the thrill of so much money. It can lead to some pretty terrible consequences.”

“You were perfectly happy to spend all that money, as I recall,” he said.

She waited a moment to be sure she could sound calm. “Your nastiness aside, none of this is about money, don’t you see that? It’s about my never being able to trust you again. It’s about the fact that our marriage is a big fraud because you’re in
one marriage, and I’m apparently in another. The person I thought you were would never put his family at risk.”

Looking exhausted, he closed his eyes. “I’m the same person I always was.”

“Well, James, that kind of makes it worse, you know? That means I never really understood what kind of person you were.”

He looked at her, his gaze hard. “Could we stop all this, please? We have to make some decisions, and we don’t have time for you to berate me for hours. What’s done is done. We need to move forward.”

Her eyes widened. “Wait—you get to do something this terrible, and then you get to dictate how much I can say about it? I’m
annoying
you?” Before he could reply, she turned and walked back to the house, trying to stifle her rage. She refilled her cup in the kitchen and sat down at her desk, her mind racing. There were phone calls to make and lists to compile, lists of awful and humiliating things to do. If only I could go back to my silly to-do lists in my pink leather book, she thought. I’d never complain about it again.

She rummaged through the filing cabinet beneath the desk to assemble an armload of files containing unpaid bills and legal documents. Setting them down, she grabbed a legal pad and a pen. She wrote “cancel” on the top left of the page and started adding whatever came to mind. Cable, newspapers, magazines, cleaning service. Credit cards. She had to find some way to pay off the balances, which were high, but to keep the cards in case they got desperate.

They also owed money at several local shops, many where
they knew the owners personally. It wasn’t that they were in any great debt to these shops, but Meg typically waited to pay the bills until she had accumulated two or three months’ worth. She recalled all the times Mr. Collins at the pharmacy had advised her when the children got sick. His many kindnesses were the reason she did her drugstore shopping at his tiny store instead of the less expensive chain. She must owe him a fair amount on the house account. He would never collect it. Alice, the lovely woman at the dry cleaner, would also go without getting paid on their open account. Glen Richards, their wonderful gardener with whom she had spent so much time discussing what plants worked best where. All these people would be cheated. The mental images made her cringe. She made a note to check on the balances and write IOUs. One day, somehow, she would make good on them.

So many ugly tasks. She jotted down their various insurance policies—medical, life, car. All paid for now, but when the next premiums came due, the policies would lapse, and if one of them got seriously ill or worse, the family would be completely unprotected.

She could see something of the lengths to which James had gone to hide his situation. For the past three months, he had been careful to maintain his usual system of transferring enough money into their checking account so she could pay the bills. What upset her even more was that if she had known the truth, she could have chosen which bills to pay. He had let her go on paying for cable television instead of putting aside funds for more important things.

Her mind drifted to the people they knew around town. She
wished with all her heart that she could disappear from Charlotte today, this very minute. She grimaced. To go where? She had several good friends here but no one she would ask to put up a family of five indefinitely. Besides, she could see herself telling her friends that James had lost his job, but sharing that he had lied to her and lost everything in a swindle was a different matter. She knew she could never bring herself to confide that to anyone. Realizing she had to live with this enormous secret made her feel completely alone in the world.

They could go to a motel until their remaining money ran out, but that wouldn’t take long. And then what? To make matters worse, she didn’t know if she could bear to go anywhere with James ever again. When had he become so obsessed with money and success that he’d given up all perspective? Losing everything, every last penny—it made no sense to Meg. He had no internal brakes, nothing to tell him that things should go so far and no farther. He had lost himself completely.

“Mommy, can you make me pancakes?” Sam stood in the kitchen doorway in his pajamas, his eyes puffy from sleep.

Meg put the pad facedown on the desk. She would give the children as long as possible to enjoy the life they knew before she yanked it out from under them. “Plain or blueberry, sweetie?”

As the day passed, Meg realized that James was avoiding her. Annoyed, she finally went to seek him out. She found him stretched out in the club chair in his office. He sat immobile, his head resting on the back of the chair, his eyes closed. “I’m awake,” he said without moving.

The sight only irritated her more. “What are you doing,
holed up in here?” She stood in front of him. “We have about a thousand things that need to be dealt with, and I can’t do it all by myself.”

He opened his eyes. “What needs to be done?” he asked in a listless tone.

“Well, I made some notes and went over …” Meg trailed off as she saw that James was gazing somewhere over her shoulder, clearly not listening. “Is this how it’s going to be? I do absolutely everything to clean up this mess? No, James.
No.
” She crossed her arms. “Yes, I see you’re sad, you’re depressed, your heart is broken. But you and I don’t have the luxury of those feelings. We have three children to take care of.”

“Kids are resilient. They’ll be okay.”

Her voice rose. “Whether they’ll be okay is another matter, but before that, they have to be
told
. Have you considered how to break this news to them?”

“I don’t know.” He rubbed his eyes tiredly. “What do you think?”

When had her husband become like this? Meg wondered. He had always been so strong emotionally. Now he seemed incapable of handling any part of the crisis he himself had brought upon them.

She took a breath. “I think we have to tell them the truth. Unfortunately, today. They need to know they can’t spend any more money on anything. More important, they need to be told what’s coming down the road. What happens to their everyday lives? To their activities, to their friends?”

“Simple enough,” James replied. He snapped his fingers. “Poof. All gone.” He abruptly leaned forward, grabbing the
chair arms angrily. “You want me to be helpful, Meg? Fine! I will take the blame and tell them Daddy wrecked their lives. Will that be sufficient?”

Meg was unmoved by his words. “You
have
wrecked their lives. And yes, that will be sufficient for now. You do all the talking, and I’ll be beside you like some philandering politician’s wife. We’ll present a united front. I’ll keep up my end. Just be sure you keep up yours and tell them the truth.”

It was nearly five in the afternoon when, seated side by side on the sofa, they called the children to the family room. Sam responded first, plopping down cross-legged on the floor. Lizzie and Will required another few shouts to get them to appear, then they slouched in armchairs, both looking somewhat put upon.

“Why the summit meeting?” Lizzie asked.

“We have some important things to tell you,” Meg said. “So please, just listen to Dad until he’s done.”

She struggled to keep her face neutral as she listened to James lay out the situation. He omitted altogether the part about pretending to go to work for the past four months. His explanation relied on a bad economy and unlucky investments in a way that absolved him from any real responsibility. The children clearly didn’t grasp the significance of what he was saying until he started explaining the immediate and painful consequences of not having any money at all. Tense, she watched her two older children’s expressions shift from barely attentive to stunned to horrified. Sam’s face remained impassive, but the growing intensity of his nail-biting said more than enough.

“
Please
tell me you’re kidding, please, please, please!” Lizzie was perched on the edge of her chair, leaning forward, her hands gripping the chair arms. “You
have
to be!”

“Yeah, this is a joke, right?” Will’s voice held anger and fear in equal measure.

By this point, Meg’s stomach was clenched so tight, she was almost bent in half, her arms crossed over her abdomen. “No,” she practically whispered. “No, it’s not a joke.”

Lizzie sounded frantic. “I don’t understand. We don’t have any money?
None
?”

James spoke firmly. “That’s right. So there will not be one dime going out of this house from now on.”

“But I need to pay Megan back for Ali’s birthday present, and—”

“Lizzie, listen to me!” James said. “Not one dime. No paying back. No movies, no shopping, no nothing.”

“We’ll still have our cell phones and laptops, right?”

James shook his head. “Not after tomorrow.”

Lizzie was wild-eyed. “You can’t do this to us!”

“It’ll be all right, honey,” Meg soothed.

Her daughter turned to her in fury. “It will not! This is the worst thing that ever happened!”

“How are we going to live?” Will asked. “Will we be able to eat?”

“Your mother and I are taking care of all the details. Don’t worry, you won’t starve. But we’ll be leaving the house in about two weeks, so you’ll need to start getting ready. We’ll only have my car, the Mustang. We can take just what we can fit into it and not one thing more.”

“
Are you crazy?
” Lizzie shrieked. “That’s impossible! We can’t live like that!”

“Leaving the house for how long?” Will’s face was white.

James paused. “For good. We’re not coming back.”

Meg tried to soften the blow of his reply. “We’re not sure where we’re going yet, but it’ll be okay. It just won’t be in Charlotte. But you have another couple of weeks in school here, which means you’ll make it almost to the end of the term. I’m sure we can make arrangements with the school so you can finish your work and get final grades for the semester.”

The children sat stock-still, trying to absorb what they were hearing.

“We’re leaving school. We’re not even staying in Charlotte.” Will reviewed what he had just learned in wonderment. “We’re poor, and we’re literally homeless.”

Sam finally spoke, his voice tremulous. “Are we going to die?”