Brass Ring (21 page)

“You and the kids are coming back to Virginia with me Monday morning,” Len’s voice boomed.

Vanessa pulled the sheet from her head and met Claire’s eyes. They held their breath, waiting for a reply from their mother.

When Mellie answered him, she didn’t speak loudly enough for the girls to make out her words. But whatever she said made Len furious.

“You fucking whore!” he yelled.

“Not so loud!” Mellie said. “You’ll wake the whole house.”

“Do you think I care? Maybe your parents should know what kind of tramp they raised.”

“Len, listen to me. You’re jumping to ridiculous conclusions.”

Len’s voice deepened to a growl, and it was impossible to understand what he said. The girls heard a sudden grunt from him, then a small scream from Mellie and the sound of a piece of furniture scraping the floor. Vanessa let out a gasp and grabbed Claire’s arm with her small, damp hand.

“Shh,” Claire said. But the voices were low and quiet now, too quiet to hear. She and Vanessa looked at each other, a deep sort of fear in their eyes that no spiders, no thunder or lightning, that nothing else in the world had ever been able to put there.

“Do we have to go back to Virginia?” Vanessa asked.

“Shh!” Claire elbowed her sharply. Vanessa was incapable of whispering. “Of course not. It’s summer. We stay here in the summer.”

The house grew still once more. No more terrible words rose from the downstairs bedroom. A gentle stream of cool air slipped through the barely open window, bringing with it the clean, rain-washed scent of the farm. Suddenly, Vanessa squeezed Claire’s arm.

“Claire?” she asked.

“What?”

“What’s a fucking whore?”

Claire thought about this for a minute. “I don’t know,” she said, and she didn’t. She was old enough, though, to know it was not a good thing to be.

The sun poured through the windows in the morning, and the walls of the room looked like lemon custard. The white eyelet curtains billowed gently at the windows, and the aroma of coffee floated on the light breeze. Claire and Vanessa dressed quietly, solemnly, neither of them mentioning the night before, but the memory of those few minutes between their parents rested in their hearts like heavy stones.

“I’m not hungry,” Claire said. “You want to skip eating with Mellie and Daddy and just go out to see Grandpa?”

Vanessa hesitated only a moment before nodding. It had been a terrible night, the sort of night that could only be forgotten in the safety of Vincent Siparo’s workshop.

Downstairs, Mellie sat alone at the kitchen table, smoking a cigarette. She hadn’t put on her makeup yet, and small lines were etched into the skin around her eyes and mouth. The whites of her eyes were pink; there were half-moons of gray on the skin beneath her lower lashes.

“Hi, babies,” she said when the girls walked into the kitchen. Her smile didn’t look real.

“We’re just going straight out to the barn,” Claire announced.

“Oh, no.” Sometimes Mellie could put on a whiny-little-girl voice, and she was doing it now. She stubbed out the cigarette. “Grandma’s on the porch shelling peas and I’m all by myself. Have some breakfast with me. I’ve been waiting for you to come down.”

Vanessa and Claire exchanged looks. They were trapped. They sat down at the table as Mellie hopped up to get the coffee.

“Is Daddy still sleeping?” Claire asked.

Mellie didn’t look at them as she splashed coffee into their cups. “Daddy had to go back to Virginia. He realized he had too much work to do to spend the whole weekend here,” she said. She sounded as if she were rehearsing the lines in a play.

“Is he mad at you, Mommy?” Vanessa only called Mellie “Mommy” when she was upset about something.

“Mad at me?” Mellie laughed as if that was the craziest thing she’d ever heard, and Vanessa actually smiled. “Why would you think a thing like that?”

Mellie plopped one of Dora’s greasy doughnuts onto each of their plates.

“We could hear you yelling last night,” Claire said.

Mellie sat down again and looked from daughter to daughter, a perplexed expression on her face. “Yelling? Last night?”

Claire nodded.

Mellie shook another cigarette from the box of Salems. “Well, we were
talking
, but we certainly weren’t
yelling
.”

“Daddy sounded mad,” Vanessa said.

Mellie slipped the cigarette between her pale lips and lit it with a shaky hand. “He was tired,” she said, blowing a stream of smoke into the air. “You know how grumpy he can sound when he’s tired?”

The girls nodded.

“I think you completely misunderstood whatever you heard, punkins,” Mellie said. Then she smiled. “That’s what you get for snooping.”

Vanessa lifted her doughnut to her mouth, pressing her tongue against the powdered sugar, her eyes never leaving her mother’s face. Claire picked her own doughnut apart on her plate. “You two have these worried little frowns on your beautiful faces.” Mellie smiled, and this time the smile looked real and reassuring. “I’ve never seen such silly little frowns.”

Vanessa scrunched up her nose, trying to make her frown even sillier, and Mellie laughed with delight.

They ate their breakfast, chatting about one of Mellie’s stories on TV as though the people in the soap opera were real—neighbors or relatives, perhaps—and as though this was just another Saturday on the farm, even though it would be the first Saturday that Len Harte was not with them.

When the girls got up to leave the table, Mellie rose, too, and gathered them into her arms, planting kisses on their cheeks and the tops of their heads.

“Nothing’s wrong, darlings,” she said. “All is right and safe and good in your world, and it will always be that way.”

LEN RETURNED TO THE
farm the following weekend, and the weekend after that as well. Only once did the girls think they heard another argument between their parents. Again, it occurred late at night, and when they asked Mellie about it the following morning, they were not at all surprised to hear they had been mistaken. Actually, Mellie told them, she and Daddy had been laughing together about one thing or another. She was sorry they had been loud enough to wake them.

But Len Harte didn’t seem like himself for the rest of that summer. He was grumpier than he used to be. Mellie said that was because he was working too much and too hard. He was absent-minded, too. Once he brought a doll for Vanessa and forgot to bring anything for Claire. It was not an intentional oversight. Anyone could see the stunned look on his face when he realized he had nothing for his oldest daughter. He said he’d inadvertently left his gift for Claire at home in Virginia. Claire tried very hard to believe him.

That night Len drove Claire into town and let her pick out a doll from the five-and-dime. The selection was limited, and the doll she chose—a pink-skinned baby doll with short brown curls—seemed plain to her. But Mellie and Dora and Vincent made such a fuss over it that by the time Claire climbed into bed that night, she had almost come to believe that her father had given her the prettiest doll of all.

BALTIMORE, MARYLAND

JON OPENED HIS EYES
in the morning to find Claire awake and watching him. Her head was on the hotel pillow, and there was a smile in her eyes. The crisp white sheet rested low on her breasts, and he reached out to slip one fingertip beneath its hem.

He remembered back to the night before, to seeing her in that crowded ballroom. He’d felt an instant of visceral attraction before he even recognized her as his wife, and a surge of pride once it all sank in. He’d had plans to get a drink with some of the conference attendees after the reception, but none of them questioned his change of heart once they’d seen Claire. It was rare for her to flaunt her looks that way. He’d forgotten how well she could do it when she wanted to.

Jon rested his palm on her cheek. “Do you know how much it means to me that you came up here?” he asked.

She curled her body closer to his, wrapping her arm around his waist, and he sank his fingers into her hair. “I wanted to sleep with you.”

“What a surprise to look up and see you in that room with all those stodgy suits. A sight for sore eyes, in that sweater. Mmm.”

“Think I’m getting too old to wear that outfit?”

“Never.” He drew away only far enough to lift her chin for a kiss, then held her close again. Sleeping with her last night, feeling so close to her, made him keenly aware of the distance that had crept between them this past month.

She had cried sometime during the night. He’d heard her, at first not placing the sound of her quiet sniffling because her tears were so rare. He had asked her what was wrong, and she’d simply requested that he hold her. She didn’t seem to want to talk, and he didn’t press her.

“What time’s your first meeting this morning?” she asked.

“Not until ten, so we can goof off for a while. Shall I call room service? Do you feel like breakfast in bed?”

She nodded, and he made the call as she lay next to him, stroking his chest.

“I want to talk to you,” she said when he had hung up the phone. “I want to tell you about my weekend so far.” There was a strange tone to her voice. She sounded like Susan when she was testing the waters, trying to determine the safety of bringing up an inflammatory topic. Or maybe it was only his imagination.

He propped up his pillow and leaned back against it, wrapping his arms around her. Her hair was everywhere—splayed over his arms and chest, pressing against his face where her temple met his cheek. “Go ahead,” he said.

“Well, Amelia got sick Friday night.”

“She did? What kind of sick?”

“Just some flu thing, but she was very upset because it would have been her and Jake’s twenty-fifth anniversary.”

“Oh, yeah. That’s right.” He coiled a strand of her hair around his finger.

“She was a mess, so I stayed with her Friday night and yesterday morning. By yesterday afternoon, though, she was feeling much better, so I—now, please don’t be upset by this, Jon.”

“Upset by what?”

In the hall outside their door, someone dropped something—a tray of dishes, perhaps—and Claire started. He held her tighter. “Well,” she said, “I’d told Randy so much about the carousel that he wanted to see the Siparo horses, so he invited us—you and me—to go to the Smithsonian. You weren’t there, of course, so I went with him alone.”

His fingers balled into a fist around the strand of hair. “Yesterday afternoon?” he asked. “Before or after you met with Gil Clayton?”

Her hand froze on his chest.

“Claire?”

“Oh, my God, Jon. I completely forgot.”

He pushed her away from him to look her in the eye. “Please tell me you’re kidding.”

She sat up, pulling the sheet to her breasts. “I guess I got confused by Amelia being sick. It threw off my plans, and it never occurred to me to check my appointment book because it was a weekend. So when Randy called I…I just completely forgot about Gil.”

“How the hell could you forget?” He wanted to shake her. “Do you know how important that meeting was? That was the whole reason you didn’t come up to this conference with me, remember? The whole reason you stayed in Vienna. Not to go out with Randy Donovan.”

“I’m sorry.”

“What the hell is happening to you?” He threw off the sheets and reached for his chair.

Claire leaned forward quickly, curving her hand around his arm, tugging at him, trying to keep him in the bed, but he shook her off. The warmth of the night was gone. Forgotten. He didn’t look at her as he transferred into his chair, and he wheeled into the bathroom with a few quick flicks of his wrists.

He closed the door behind him and sat still for a few minutes, breathing deeply, trying to get control over an anger that was alien to him. He pictured Gil Clayton arriving at the deserted foundation office, unable to get in. Checking his watch. Freezing in yesterday’s windy cold. How the hell would they make this up to him?
Damn Claire
.

She was wearing jeans and a white sweater by the time he came out of the bathroom and had combed the tousled look out of her hair as best she could. She must not have taken the time the night before to remove her eye makeup, and now there were faint dark circles beneath her eyes. On the table by the window rested the two breakfast trays, which must have arrived while he was in the bathroom.

She stood up. “I’m sorry, Jon,” she said again. She was wringing her hands. He had never seen her do that before. “I really screwed up. I know that.”

He didn’t look at her as he wheeled to the table. “I’m done in the bathroom if you want it.”

She squeezed his shoulder as she walked past him toward the bathroom, and Jon sat stiffly, seething above his orange juice and fruit cup and muffin. Was there any time during their twenty-three years together that he’d felt this kind of anger toward her? He could think of none. But there had never been a Randy Donovan in her life before.

She came out of the bathroom and sat across from him at the circular table, making no move toward the food on her tray. “I’ll call Gil when we’re done with breakfast and apologize.”

“It’s too late for a simple apology. Maybe you’ve forgotten, but this is a man we’ve cajoled and begged and kissed up to for the past three years. We’ll have to come up with something more inventive than ‘I’m sorry.’ I’ll take care of it.” He knew that the tone of his voice implied that he no longer trusted her with this. And he didn’t. He glanced at her. She was staring down at her plate, and he saw her swallow hard.

He ate an orange section from the fruit bowl on his tray. “So,” he asked. “Was it worth it?” He was appalled at the sarcasm in his voice. He knew how to fight fair. He trained people in those skills. Right now, though, there was greater satisfaction in fighting dirty.

“Was what worth it?” She raised her huge green eyes to him.

“Your little trek to the museum, which I might point out is the type of trek you and I haven’t made together in what…a decade?”

“You always say we never have time.”

“No, Claire.
You
always say that, but apparently you can find time when the magnificent Randy calls, even if it means shirking your responsibilities.”