Antonia's Choice (9 page)

“Well, too bad, because I've got Ben signed up. He starts in May—and he's playing soccer until then.”

“What's this all about?” Chris said. “I thought you were too busy to get him into after-school activities.”

“I just think he needs some outlets. You know how much energy he has.”

“So, is that girl—what's her name, Lindsay—is she taking him?”

“No, I am. I'm working afternoons at home now so I can be available for Ben.”

There was a long pause. I could picture Chris taking that all in, his brown-eyes-on-the-edge-of-green pondering some object on the coffee table as he processed information that had come as a surprise to him. His attorney self wouldn't let him reveal that he'd been caught off guard, of course. It was something he'd learned early in his career: any kind of agitation looked unnatural layered on top of the soft boyishness of his eyes and his smile, as if things negative didn't fit him. Juries, he said, didn't like to be jarred that way.

“I like the sound of that,” he said now.

Like I was waiting for your approval,
I thought. But I bit it back. I actually felt a little guilty about holding back the fact that Ben's behavior was getting worse.

“What I don't like,” Chris went on, “is that I'm being left out of this equation.”

Here it came. I closed my eyes and pretended I was talking to Jeffrey Faustman. “You can see him anytime you want to.”

“Not when he's twelve hours away.”

I dug my feet between the suede cushions on the study couch.

“Tell me something,” I said. “If we were with you in Richmond and we had Ben in sports, would you make homemade granola bars?”

“What the heck does that have to do with soccer?”

“Everything, apparently. I didn't even know until my first soccer meeting that juice boxes are the drink of choice in the kindergarten set—did you?”

“Juice comes in boxes?”

“And would you catch balls while he hit them off the T?”

“You better believe it.”

“Really. When? At 9 P.M., when you get home from the office? Or at 7 A.M. on Saturday before you go to the office?”

“I would find the time for my son.”

“You'd pencil him in.”

“Toni, come on—”

“I'm not trying to pick a fight with you, Chris. I'm just being realistic. I've always done it all since the day Ben was born, and I see no evidence that it would change if I came back to Richmond.”

He stopped to ponder again. I took that time to congratulate myself. I could very easily have inserted the fact that although he had never had time to spend with Ben, he
had
carved out enough hours for a girlfriend. I tried never to lower myself to that tactic. Besides, he would only have countered with, “If you hadn't insisted on working, you would've had time for me and then I wouldn't have strayed.” And then I would have been up all night with spinal pain all the way to my jaw. It was the one thing that had bruised me beyond reconciliation—the fact that Chris had never really said he was sorry about her.

“Okay,” he said, “game point for you this time.”

“Are we keeping score?”

Chris laughed his soft, husky chuckle. “You wouldn't have it any other way, little Miss Competition. I bet you can tell me without even looking it up what you've got in stock options versus what I've got.”

“You betcha.”

He chuckled again. “You're a piece of work, girl.”

I had to grin. And
that
was why that bruise ached so deep in my soul.

“So,” I said, “you want to talk to Ben?”

“Yeah—but listen. How's your mother doing? She was practically hysterical when I went over there the other night.”

I had to do a double-take. “You went over there?”

“She called and asked for my help, so I went over. Anyway, I didn't do much to cheer her up.”

“That's what I gathered. Is it really that bad?”

“It's worse. Toni, you know Bobbi could go to prison for a long time for this.”

“If she had anything to do with it.”

“Wyndham sure claims she did.”

I sat up straighter on the couch. “Did you see her?”

“Yeah. Talked to her. Wasn't she always kind of wishy-washy?”

“Something like that. Why?”

“She's sure a hardnose right now. She told me she hoped they never let Bobbi out.”

“Really.” I pressed my temple with my free hand. “I guess I have my work cut out for me.”

“What do you mean?”

“Wyndham's coming here to stay for a while—so my mother doesn't throw her to the wolves.”

There was more pondering, and I didn't like the feel of it this time.

“Do you have a problem with that?” I said.

“I don't know. I just wonder if you have enough time for her.”

The rest was so thickly implied I could almost see it.

“Let me go get Ben,” I said.

With a little less than a week to get ready for Wyndham, I shifted into high gear. I decided to use the one bedroom upstairs that Ben and I weren't using, tucked down the hall that also led to the laundry room. It had its own bath, just as Ben's room did, which I was sure a teenage girl would die for. Beyond that, I was clueless.

I took one look at the heavy red drapes that fell into folds at the floor, and even I knew that wasn't adolescent material. I was surveying the probably overpriced artwork on the walls when I noticed a gift bag, spewing yellow tissue, on the dresser. The card peeking out of it read “Toni” in my mother's flawless penmanship.

For an eerie moment I thought she'd slipped into the house and was there even now—until I remembered that the day she went home she'd told me she had left “a little something” for me. Because just hours later our lives had been run over with a backhoe, I'd forgotten all about it. Since then no one had been in this room except the Merry Maids who, it appeared, had carefully lifted the little package and dusted under it.

I sank down on the satin comforter and opened the card. My mother's delicate Clinique scent was still on it.

Toni,
she'd written inside,
I want only to see you happy. Perhaps this will remind you that the past was not all bad and that happiness can be found again in what you once had. I love you
—
Mama.

I was almost afraid to dig into the bag. The past wasn't a place I wanted to return to just then. But curiosity got the better of me and I gingerly pulled out the tissue paper in handfuls. In the bottom of the bag was a framed photo.

It was a picture of Ben and me and Chris, heads tossed about in various attitudes of gaiety, mouths wide open as if we'd reached the heights of joy. I was holding Ben on one hip, and Chris had his arm around my shoulders.

“When on earth was this taken?” I muttered to myself. “I don't ever remember us being
this
happy.”

It took me several minutes to realize we must have been at a Memorial Day picnic, five months before I left Chris. We were in Bobbi's backyard—and Sid had taken the picture.

I dropped the thing on the bed and wiped my hands on the legs of my jeans. Laughing up at me were faces that had laughed with Sid—had looked at him, not knowing what he was capable of.

How could we not have seen that?
I thought.
How could we not have known?

I stared at it for a while, nausea rising up into my throat, before I picked it up with two fingers and dropped it, frame and all, into the wastebasket.

I returned abruptly to getting Wyndham's room teenager-ized. I went out that afternoon and bought a half-dozen teen magazines to get ideas, but after leafing through the first one I knew Kevin Pollert wasn't going to be in favor of my redecorating his guestroom with large neon stripes on the walls and assorted paraphernalia hanging from the ceiling.

I decided I would take Wyndham shopping after she arrived to pick out a new bedspread and some posters. Meanwhile, I packed the sterling silver and pewter knickknacks away, and then concentrated on Ben. I spent most of that weekend, when I wasn't catching up on work, prepping him for his first soccer practice on Monday.

I should have saved my breath.

Ben brooded all the way from the school to the soccer field Monday afternoon. He didn't start his actual screaming until I told him to go into the boys bathroom to change into play clothes. He didn't want to go in there by himself—but he wouldn't come into the girls side with me, either. A well-meaning father's offer to accompany him brought on an even louder torrent of shrieks. Finally, I told him he could practice in his school clothes, and I did manage to get his shoes changed.

As more and more kids arrived, bouncing up and down as if they couldn't keep their excitement inside their skins, Ben withdrew further into his, and my anxiety built.

“This is going to be a blast, Pal,” I said to him about eighteen times.

He only looked at me suspiciously, and when Coach Gary blew his whistle and the kids flew at him like a flock of geese, Ben hunkered himself down on the bench and planted his feet two inches into the dirt.

“The coach is calling you,” I said. “You don't want to miss out.”

He might have bought that if I hadn't forgotten myself and given him an encouraging little push. He turned on me, teeth bared.

“You don't know what I want!” he said. “I don't wanna play soccer!”

“Hey, Benjamin!” Coach Gary called out cheerily. He had a bright red face and a thick neck and a gap-toothed grin that had every kid there charmed like the children of Hamlin Town—except mine.

“Just try it for today,” I said. “If you don't like it—”

“I already hate it!”

“Miz Wells?”

Gary was at my elbow now. I looked up to see the team standing in a knot where he'd left them, gazing open-mouthed at Ben. I didn't look up into the bleachers, but I was sure the mothers had similar expressions on their faces.

I did look at Gary. He was still smiling, but his eyes drooped sympathetically at the corners.

“Why don't you just leave him with me?” he said. “I bet with you out of sight, he'll do just fine.”

“No-ooo!”

It was the most terrified sound I had heard come out of my son yet. And to my bewilderment, he wrapped both arms around my leg and clung like a ball and chain.

“Don't leave me! Mommy—please—you always leave me. Don't leave me.”

It would only be by the grace of God, I knew, if no one called CPS on
me.
I squatted down in front of Ben and peeled him from my leg so I could get him close enough to my face to restore some sense of privacy to our confrontation. We were completely on public display.

“I'll tell you what,” I whispered to him. “If you'll go out there and learn to play soccer, I'll stay right here. I won't leave, not even for a minute.”

He started to shake his head, but I put my finger to my lips. “Those are your only two choices, Pal. What's it gonna be?”

He didn't hesitate. “Don't leave,” he said.

There was fire in his eyes as he trailed off behind Gary, but at least he was cooperating for the moment. There would be the devil to pay when we got home, but that was then. This was now.

Trying not to look as mortified as I felt, I climbed halfway up the bleachers and made it a point to sit next to one of the mothers, rather than isolate myself into a corner and endure their well-concealed whispers. Southern women, I had discovered, were professionals at dazzling someone with a smile and cutting her right down to her bone marrow the minute she looked away.

It wasn't until I was settled in sunglasses and a visor that I realized I was sitting beside the seamless woman with the diamonds I'd talked to at the meeting. She was holding the bejeweled hand out to me.

“Yancy Bancroft,” she said.

I took her hand, careful not to impale myself, and said, “Toni Wells. It's Yancy, not Nancy?”

“Right. Family name.”

“Nice. Very classy.”

“Well, thank you,” she said. “Aren't you sweet?”

Most things were in this part of the country. I smiled it off. That seemed to be all she needed to consider herself on an intimate basis with me.

“You know, my son went through something like what yours is going through right now, just about a year ago now.”

“Oh?”

“He carried on so bad I wanted to keep a bag with me so I could pull it over my head—or his.” She leaned in conspiratorially. “My mother had just passed on and I was in such a state. My daughter was fine, but Troy just absorbed it all, and I tell you, he was one handful.”

“Oh!” I hoped soon for something I could actually respond to. I was running out of different inflections for the word
oh.

Yancy's diamonds flashed in the sun. “You seem to be handling it a lot better than I did, but you know, just in case it gets to you, or he—what's his little name?”