She Poured Out Her Heart (39 page)

“I guess you had one for her too.”

“Just because things don't work out, that doesn't mean you lose all the feeling. She was a good woman. Too good for me. She had a good heart.”

Not good enough, Bonnie thought. Carl Rizzi said, “Look, I really do have to get back.”

“To Ohio.”

“Yeah, Ohio.” He held out his hand and they shook. His hand was spare and hard. “You have my number, right? Tell your brother he can call me if he wants. We can talk the drunk talk. See if it takes.”

“Thanks. I'll let him know.”

“You look good,” Carl Rizzi said. “All dressed up and everything. You dodged the drunk curse, right?” He smiled. He was missing a tooth up front, in one corner of his mouth.

“I've been thinking I should quit drinking. At least cut back.” She didn't know why she told him. It wasn't like it was any of his business.

“If you think you should, then yes, you should. But your mother said you were all right. I did worry about you kids. The genetic predisposition. That's what it's called. I'm glad you didn't inherit that godawful misery. All right, I'm out of here. Take care.”

Bonnie watched him walk away across the parking lot. There was a slight hitch in his step, one leg gone stiff. She didn't know if what she felt was loss, exactly, because how could you lose a father you never had in the first place? He had bequeathed her a different misery, a hunger for men who never stayed around.

J
ane was not unhappy with the way things were working out.

At night she slept in the little spare room she'd arranged for herself. She told the children it was so she could hear them better if they needed her. Eric did not make objections. They no longer argued. They spoke about their children's schedules and who would be where (at the dentist's, at soccer practice), they conferred as needed about household accounts and taking the cars in for maintenance. Jane fixed Eric's dinner along with everyone else's and sometimes he was there to eat it and sometimes he was not. But he almost always arrived home by the children's bedtime and read them their good-night stories and played good-night games. He was a fun daddy. Jane went to bed soon after the children and left Eric looking over paperwork in the den, his feet up, a drink beside him on the table, the television talking quietly to itself.

She assumed that Eric saw Bonnie on those evenings when he arrived home late. Or some of those evenings. Maybe called her after Jane went to bed. Talked about whatever it was they talked about in between screwing. Jane didn't pretend to know and she didn't ask. Maybe they talked about Jane from time to time, although she hoped they had something more interesting to discuss.

If Eric was detached, he at least seemed to be on an even keel. Life
might go on like this for some time. Was it the normal way of arranging things? She supposed not, but you never knew how other people lived, how they really lived, even in the placid suburbs. People sent out Christmas cards, they kept up their lawns and waved to each other when they hauled garbage cans to and from the curb. But every so often you heard stories. Even someone as disconnected to gossip as Jane was might hear stories. A neighbor caught in a prostitution sting. A grown son moving back into his parents' guest room, trailing failures. A wife and mother who was said to be away, visiting relatives in another state, and who never came home.

Surely more people carried on in day to day boredom, or day to day contentment, than got caught up in scandals. But who were people behind their closed doors, and how did they treat one another? How did they navigate love, spite, sex, grievance, and all the rest of it? Jane had no idea. Human beings were a mystery to her, as she was often a mystery to herself.

It was not unusual for a married person to stray from the marriage, for partners to go outside the boundaries. She told herself this. And there were places in the world, and times in history, where people practiced polygamy, or it was understood and permitted that husbands might keep mistresses, and wives, have lovers. But how were such things managed, and did you ever get used to them? Was one system more natural, or unnatural, than another? She did not know if she had failed at marriage, or transcended it out of some accidental wisdom. She had no real guide, either within or outside of herself. She understood there was such a thing as passion, and that often enough it drove people to some brink, but much in the same way that she understood there was such a thing as arithmetic.

Bonnie was just one of the topics she and Eric did not discuss. There were times when Jane was tempted to ask how Bonnie was, or to tell Bonnie she said hello. But they weren't at that casual point yet, if they ever would be. It was hard to imagine the three of them sitting down to
dinner together, as they had so often done over the years. At least, not after the last time.

She and Bonnie had talked when Bonnie's mother died. Jane knew all about Bonnie's crazy family. She knew that Bonnie had not really lived up to Claudia's expectations, and vice versa. But you only ever had one mother. It had seemed like the right thing to do, calling. “How was the funeral, did everybody behave?”

“Charlie was drunk.”

“Well, yeah.”

“My father was sober.”

“Stan?”

“No, BioDad.”

“Who? The actual, real—”

“Uh huh.”

“You're kidding,” Jane said. The BioDad was a practically mythic figure, the king of bad fathers. Like Darth Vader, but Italian. “So what was he like? What did you say to him?”

“We didn't talk that much. He didn't exactly want to rejoin the family circle.”

“But he came to the funeral, right?” Jane was conscious of a reticence on Bonnie's part, things she might have said if not for the inconvenient awkwardness of the whole Eric situation. “At least you got to see him.”

“Like I said, he was sober. I guess that's a relatively new development.”

“Good,” Jane told her, with more enthusiasm than was required, to make up for Bonnie's lack of it. “It had to be good to see what he's really like, after all this time.”

“‘Good' is stretching it.”

“All right,” Jane said, after waiting for Bonnie to say more. “At least you can cross it off your list. BioDad, revealed.”

“You don't want to think your life turns out one way or another because of your parents, you know? You want to believe you're a free agent and you made your own choices. Aside from things like eye color or
freckles. You want to think you're self-created. At least I always did. I wasn't going to be a big sack of crazy, like the rest of my relatives.”

“You aren't. You didn't.”

“Yeah, maybe. All right, look, I should—”

“Sure.”

“I'll talk to you some other time,” Bonnie said, and got off the phone while Jane was still trying to formulate ways to both say and not say the rest of it. Bonnie was the person she knew best in the world, and now there would be a divide between them.

Grace had started kindergarten, Robbie was in the second grade. Now Jane had the mornings to herself. She drove the children to school, came home, tidied the kitchen, started the laundry. Once her chores were finished, time sifted over her like dust. She sat at the kitchen table and watched light track across the window. No visions came to her. Maybe they had bled out of her after too much exhausted worry, too much kid noise, too many nincompoop arguments.

Eventually it would be time to pick Grace up again and hear about her day at school. At least Grace got to color and sing nursery songs.

She missed Bonnie. She began to consider that she'd made a mistake in the way she'd behaved, that she'd shamed Bonnie to the point where the two of them had no clear space in which to speak or stand. Jane had been angry then and she'd wanted to force things out into the open. But maybe she should have kept her peace. Should have left Bonnie and Eric to carry on their furtive affair until it wore out or blew up in everyone's face. She'd been angry, and now she was only lonesome.

She picked out a sympathy card and wrote a brief, careful note. But rather than mail it, she chose a Saturday morning when Eric had taken the children on one of their Dad excursions—these were officially cast as fun, rather than guilt-driven—and set out for Bonnie's apartment. She'd baked peanut butter cookies for the kids and she packed some of these in a wicker basket. She didn't call ahead so as not to give Bonnie a
chance to make excuses not to see her. Bonnie would probably be home, but even if she wasn't, she could leave her offerings.

How long had it been since she'd driven into the city by herself? Although Bonnie's neighborhood only technically qualified as urban. Jane told herself she'd become a total stick-in-the-mud, never leaving her small, safe zone. She was nervous about the expressway at first, all the high speed bad drivers, but then she got the hang of it and increased her speed to keep up with the rest of the mayhem. She allowed herself a bit of cautious confidence. The city's hazy skyscrapers approached on the horizon. Once upon a time she used to live among them.

The closest she and Eric had come to a conversation lately was when he'd asked her, as if it were a casual thought, something that had just come to him, if Jane had considered going back to work. Now that the kids were in school.

She hadn't. “Doing what?” she asked him.

“I don't know, what you used to do. Public health. Clinics. Research studies. Or something else entirely.” Eric ran out of ideas and encouragement then and waited for Jane to say yes (or no), what a good (or bad) idea that was. He looked hopeful, even a bit timid. As if he might not be allowed, at this point, to give her any sort of suggestion.

Jane said, “I expect it would help to have some extra money coming in. We have to start thinking about college.”

Eric made a certain kind of face that she recognized, an impatience at being misunderstood. “Sure, but I was thinking, something that would really involve you. Speak to you, be important to you. Because I don't think you've ever had that.”

Oh but she had. Except the visions had failed her, she'd worn them down with too much ordinary spite and grief. She said, “I guess I should think about that.” Hoping she didn't sound too droopy and defeated. She did not believe that Eric was only proposing a way for her to keep herself occupied while he and Bonnie entertained each other. He still cared
about her welfare. Or at least felt responsible for her. “I can look for things online.”

“It wouldn't have to be public health. It could be anything. You could take classes. See what they have at the community college.” His enthusiasm rose, encouraged by his ideas.

“I could volunteer,” Jane said, meaning it sarcastically, since that seemed like one more thing that suburban dilettantes did. But Eric said that by all means, she could volunteer. There were so many great organizations out there that needed volunteers. She was bound to meet some interesting people. It was a long time since anyone had found her interesting.

Here was Bonnie's exit. Jane took it, drove a ways, then had to double back when she got confused. She never thought about using GPS until she was already at a place, or already lost. She guessed she should have asked Eric for directions, ha ha. Everything looked the same to her here, the bungalows on their narrow lots with their old-fashioned awnings and brick chimneys, the middle-aged shopping centers. Once Bonnie had moved in, Jane had only visited once, and that was to drop off some curtains Bonnie thought she might be able to use. Jane felt bad that it had only been the once. As if she was always the busy one, and she guessed she was, but nothing that kept you busy seemed like anything that ought to keep you housebound. Maybe she really should get a job.

Jane came to a street she thought she recognized, and then another, and here was Bonnie's building. She parked out front, after studying the signs that threatened you about snow routes and street cleaning. Leaves had been raked and set out on the curb in brown paper lawn bags. Bonnie's front blinds were half open and there was no way to tell if she was home or not. Jane retrieved her basket of cookies and the card from the seat beside her. It seemed stupid to have brought the cookies.

At Bonnie's door she rang the bell, waited, knocked, waited again. “Bonnie?” she called, in case she might be mistaken for a Jehovah's Witness or someone selling meat off a truck. No answer. Jane walked out
back to the parking spaces. Bonnie's car wasn't there. It was a disappointment, but also something of a relief.

When she came back inside, a man was standing at Bonnie's door, knocking. He looked up at Jane when she came in, then away again. “I don't think she's home,” Jane said.

“Uh huh.” Not interested in conversation. He was tall and oversized, with a big square handsome face and ruddy skin. He was dressed in jeans and a leather jacket and a black T-shirt. Jane felt the inner commotion that Bonnie used to call Jane's Spidey Sense.

Jane said, “You're Patrick.”

He left off knocking then and gave her a mistrustful, startled look. “Do I know you?”

“I'm Jane. Friend of Bonnie's.”

“She's told you all about me, is that it?”

In fact Bonnie pretty much had. “Like I said, I don't think she's home. I don't know where she is.”

“Huh.” Patrick considered this, knocked again, so as not to appear that he was paying any real attention to Jane.

“She wasn't expecting me.” Jane waited to see if he'd volunteer his own information, but he just kept knocking and looking pissed off. She turned to go, then remembered her card and the cookies and hesitated. She didn't want to leave anything at the door as long as this large and glowering man was hanging around. She said, “Maybe I'll call her now.”

Jane stepped outside, went out to the sidewalk, and stood next to her car. She dialed Bonnie's number and got voice mail. “Hi, guess what, I'm over at your apartment. I just stopped by. No biggie,” she added, in case Bonnie might think she was there for a throwdown or a catfight. “I miss you. Well OK, talk to you later.”

Patrick came out then and walked up to her. Hands in his pockets, looking from side to side. A bit of a strut in his step. “Sex on wheels,” Bonnie had called him. Or one of the things she had called him. “So, you reach her?”

Jane said she had not, that she had left a message. “You didn't say I was here, did you?” His speech had a lilt, or maybe a tilt, to it. Echo of Ireland, filtered through a layer of South Side. Jane shook her head no. “Ah,” Patrick said. “Just as well. We had a bit of a dustup.”

That was one word for it. Jane raised her eyebrows politely. “Oh, that's too bad.”

“Misunderstanding. Clearing the air.” As if he cared what Jane thought, that is, he so clearly did not care.

“It was probably the money that really got her mad,” Jane said.

He stared at her. Unfriendly. That wasn't going to stop her.

“I hope it wasn't all that much. She wouldn't tell me. She was embarrassed. But when you get money involved, it can throw such an ugly light on everything.”

For a long minute Patrick's face stayed frozen in its menacing stare, and then it crumpled into a grin. “Ah well. Get a woman mad enough and she runs her mouth.”

Jane was unsure if he was referring to Bonnie or to herself. “She was angry, yes.”