Antonia's Choice (2 page)

Mama's eyes sprang open a little. “That's exactly what I'm saying. And I think it's worse because you've moved him five hundred miles from his father so he barely gets to see the man.”

“Chris was just here the week before you came. They went to Disneyworld.”

“It was a vacation,” Mom said. “That doesn't constitute a relationship between a father and a son.”

“It's something, though,” Stephanie said. “I think Toni's doing the best she can—”

“Chris should've thought about his relationship with his son before he slept with another woman,” I said. I'd already hit I-40. I had to move on.

“For heavens sake, Antonia,” my mother said. “Can't you forgive the man one transgression? It's not as if he was a drunk or into drugs—something he was refusing to change. Chris isn't going to make that mistake again.”

I took my eyes off the Mercedes in front of me long enough to give her a look. “How could you possibly know that?
I
don't know it. I don't know that I can trust Chris now. He did it once—why wouldn't he do it again?”

“Because you would work on your marriage. But you won't even try. You refuse to go to counseling—”

“I don't believe in letting some third party who has no idea what I've been through tell me what to do.”

I gunned the motor and slipped in front of a semi in the right lane. Maybe it was a good thing that most of the heavy traffic on I-40 was headed into Nashville while we headed out. This trip couldn't be fast enough at this point. As I checked to make sure the trucker I'd just cut off wasn't going to rear-end me, I caught
Stephanie's face in the rearview mirror.

She was sucking in her bottom lip, accentuating the Kerrington overbite. A tiny line had appeared between her wide eyes, and she was toying with one of the dark curls that fell over her shoulder.

Even as the angst built in her face, I still thought she was the prettiest of us three girls, inheriting our father's handsomeness in a way I could never hope to. It wasn't just the to-die-for hair, the willowy figure, the big eyes. It was the compassion that came out of every pore—and had me spilling my guts to her every time I got the chance. She knew, because I had told her, that there was more to my split with Chris than his affair. And she knew I didn't want to go there with Mama—who since our father's death five years ago had begun to deify marriage.

Besides, I didn't even want to go there with myself right now. My back was doing that thing it did every time I thought about Chris. It stiffened from the base of my spine to the back of my head, and my jaws tightened down as if Chris himself were in there with a ratchet set. I was going to be in pain any second if I didn't manipulate a subject change.

“Children need to be with their parents—both their parents,” Mama said.

“Are you going to start comparing me to Bobbi?” I said. It was a pretty weak segue, but it was the best I could do on the spot.

“I never compare you girls to each other. But since you brought it up, Bobbi and Sid are both with their children, yes.”

“And your point is?” I said. “Every time I've seen them over the last two years, they looked like a pretty miserable little group to me. Sid moping over in the corner. Bobbi with the two little ones hanging on her like baby monkeys with their noses running.” I put up my hand. “No, make that Emil still breast feeding at age three and a half, and Techla hanging on Wyndham—who to me is more like a nanny than a teenage girl. Yeah, being together as a family is really working for them.”

“You haven't seen them since you moved,” Mama said. “What's that, two and a half months now?”

I didn't answer.

“They're actually doing better,” Stephanie said. “I mean, at least it seemed like it Valentine's Day when I went over to take the kids their presents.”

“They were in financial trouble over the past few years, you know that,” Mama said. “Something like that can bring a family down. But the point is that they stayed together and toughed it out, and I think they're stronger for it.”

I exchanged glances with Stephanie in the mirror. Her eye roll reflected my own disgust with Mama's always-predictable defense of Bobbi. Our older sister could rob a bank and Mama would find a way to make it a virtuous deed on Bobbi's part.
She's always been fragile,
Mama had said approximately a thousand times.
Her sensitivity is what makes her such a beautiful person.

I loved my sister because…she was my sister. But in my view, Bobbi had always been a wimp. Her neediness was what made her such a pain to be around for more than thirty minutes. Besides, she didn't really need me when she'd had Mama fawning over her all her life.

I could feel my mother giving me a pointed look. “I think it helped that Bobbi is a stay-at-home mom.”

“It might help Sid,” I said, “but I don't think it helps Bobbi. Personally, I think it would do her good to get her focus off the kids and him for at least a couple of hours a day.”

My mother chewed on that for a second before she said, “Bobbi's services as a babysitter certainly came in handy for you during those last months before you left Richmond.”

“I didn't leave Ben there because I needed a babysitter,” I said tightly. “Ben loves Emil. They're more like twins than Emil and Techla are. Ben was having a rough time, and I thought it was good for him to be with his cousin.”

“No need to get defensive,” Mama said. “I was just pointing out that—”

“So what's Sid doing now?” I said. I didn't really care what my brother-in-law did. He'd never been my favorite human being; he just came in handy at the moment.

“Something with computers,” Mom said.

“I thought he lost his shirt in that dot-com thing he was involved in.”

“This is different—he's doing something with websites, and it's obviously very successful.”

“Ya think?” Stephanie said. “They just added a whole studio onto their house.”

“That place was four thousand square feet to begin with.”

Stephanie gave one of her signature snorts. “You don't exactly live in a shack yourself.”

“My shack's rented,” I said. “And I can only afford that because it belongs to a client.”

“There's nothing wrong with the house you and Chris
own
in Richmond, either,” Mama said. “I drive by it every now and then. Chris is keeping the lawn up.”

I had never been so glad to see the Nashville terminal, or more grateful for the overzealous security people who blew their whistles if a driver left his car stopped at the curb for more than seven seconds.

“I would come in with you,” I said, flipping the trunk release and whipping open my door, “but I really have to get to work.”

“Not a problem,” Stephanie said. She caught up with me at the trunk and planted a kiss on my cheek.

I felt a wave of longing. I really wanted her to stay.

My mother pulled me into her arms then, and I felt just as overwhelming a wave—of guilt. She really cared. I knew that. And I could be such a witch in the face of it.

Spine feeling like a piece of barbed wire, I hugged her back and whispered that I loved her. Mama's face looked pained as the guard blew insistently on his whistle and she pulled away.

“I love you, too,” she said. “And I just want you to be happy. I know that if you would just—”

“Come on, Mama, before this poor man blows a gasket,” Stephanie said. “Love you, Sis.”

I blew them both a kiss and slid back into the front seat, cupping myself in leather. It was suddenly too quiet in the car. All the stuff Mama had just opened up about Chris and about Ben filled up the air space.

“I'm not going there,” I said out loud. “Work. Think about work.”

Not hard to do. I had the meeting with Jeffrey first thing that I needed to concentrate on.

As I waited behind a line of cars, I took a quick glance in the rearview mirror again to make sure I had the right look for the meeting. Aside from the tousled hair, the result of having done a whole day's work already, I was probably passable.

That sent a pang through me. Chris had always said that. I would come out of the bedroom after an hour in front of the mirror and he'd get that impish glimmer in his eyes and smile—his smile was so slow it was maddening—and he'd say, “You'll pass.”

In his more amorous moments, of course, it had been different. The Louisiana drawl he'd tried so hard to hide since law school would ooze right on out into, “Baby, do you know how hard it was for me to keep my hands out of your hair this entire evening?”

“I'm so sure you were going to run your fingers through my hair while you were entertaining clients, Wells,” I would tell him. “Give me a break.”

“I'm serious, darlin'. I saw it all thick and blond and tucked behind your ears and I wanted to slide my fingers right in there.”

“Get over yourself!”

“Look at your eyes, lookin' so brown, just a-twinklin' at me, telling me, ‘Come here, boy.'”

“In your dreams.”

“Let me just hug on that cute little ol' body—”

Uh-huh,
I thought now.
Did you say the same things to that little paralegal you bedded down?

I shook my head, tossing back my bangs.
Don't go there,
I told myself.
Do not EVEN go there.

I went back to Jeffrey Faustman.

Whether or not my mother was right about the causes of Ben's behavior, it was obvious I was going to have to do something about it before he started slipping out at night with a can of spray paint. Not to mention the fact that Ben and I were miserable. It seemed like all we did was scream at each other. Chris and I hadn't even
done that, which made me wonder why Ben had chosen that as his latest means of expressing himself.

During the two weeks my mother was there I had had to admit, begrudgingly, that she was correct about one thing: I wasn't spending enough time with Ben. An hour in the morning, trying to get cereal down his throat without tossing the whole bowl against the wall, and an hour and a half between the time I got home from work and the time he was supposed to be in bed really didn't cut it.

The night before, when I'd finally gotten Ben to sleep for the second time after the bed-wetting ordeal, I'd stayed up forming a plan, which by dawn sounded reasonable to me. Now I just had to convince Jeffrey.

The baggy-pants gardener was out in front of Faustman Financial Services putting in a flat of pansies when I pulled into the circular driveway. For a mad moment I wished I had his job, complete with the amount of derriere he was showing over the top of his rather pointless belt. To my knowledge he never had to take files home.

You know you love what you do,
I told myself.
You'll get through this phase with Ben and then you can get refocused on the joys of handling other people's money. You can do this. You can do anything.

I could feel myself setting my jaw, bringing my overbite into full view. As vain as I admittedly was about my appearance, I'd never wanted to have that fixed. I'd seen myself once when a TV camera had caught me cheering in the Orange Bowl, the year Florida was ranked number one, and I'd kind of liked the overbite. It gave me character. Chris always said so.

“Would you
stop!”
I said into the rearview. “What is with the Chris obsession today?”

I marched my little self up to the oak double doors and breezed into the foyer, where the brass umbrella stand and the leaf-perfect ficus plant greeted me. Regina Acklee looked up from the reception desk, blue eyes taking inventory.

“You on a mission this mornin', honey?” she said. She glanced at the grandfather clock that ticked solemnly across from her desk. “Jeffrey's gonna wish your mission was to get here on time.”

“What am I, two minutes late?” I said.

“Ninety seconds.” She gave me a toothy smile. “But who's counting?”

I set my briefcase down on the marble floor and sat on the edge of the chair at Reggie's desk. I could feel the bumps of the brocade through my pants.

“What kind of mood is he in?” I said.

Reggie glanced over both shoulders at the office, which was perfectly quiet except for the soft tinkle of Mozart. If anyone were blinking within a hundred feet, we would have heard it.

Reggie then leaned forward, fingernails tapping on the oak desktop. I couldn't resist a peek at what she had going today. One shade short of fire engine red, each with a slant of gold. The pinkie had a ring in it. I could never figure out how she typed with those talons.

“He's Mr. Business today,” she said, barely moving her lips. “You know, all crisp—callin' me Miz Acklee and tellin' me to hold his calls.”

“Oh.”

Her eyes narrowed, revealing more of the makeup job that must take her two hours to apply with that kind of precision. I'd always been in awe of it.

“What kind of mission are you on, honey?”

Although I was an associate and Reggie was the receptionist, it had never bothered me that she called me “honey,” “baby,” “sugar,” and assorted combinations thereof. I trusted her more than I did anyone else in the office, including my own assistant, who daily made it evident that it was my job she'd really rather have.

Reggie was watching me closely. “The way you're lookin,” she said, “this may not be the day to approach His Worshipfulness.”

“I have to. I've got to spend more time with Ben, so I'm going to ask Jeffrey to let me work mornings here and afternoons at home. I can schedule all my appointments in the mornings, and if I have to do any evening meetings I can get a babysitter and do them after Ben goes to sleep.
If
he goes to sleep.”

“Oh, honey, does he still have that screamin' thing goin' on?”