Authors: Pamela Morsi
I nodded. “She’s probably sitting up for me in the living room at this very moment.”
He laughed like it was a good joke.
She was waiting for me. But at least she was in the kitchen. And there was coffee.
B
ABS
I
KNEW
THAT
Laney was having an affair with Stan. I didn’t condemn her for it. In the years since she’d moved in with Robert, most of the world had changed on that issue. All over McKinney, and probably the rest of the country, couples were casually cohabiting with no consequences from the community. So, I didn’t condemn her. I did worry about her. Feminism and equal rights may have changed the way women looked at the world. But I was afraid that how the world looked at women was not all that different.
I worried that making herself so available to him, no strings attached, made it easier and easier for him to avoid strings at all. If I’d been less interested in her happiness, I might have been able to keep my mouth shut. But I just kept talking and she didn’t appreciate it at all.
“If you make that cow and milk statement again,” she said. “I will have to kill you.”
She’d just gotten home from another all-night date. I’d had to take Rachel to preschool so she could get a shower and dress for her day on the job. She was working for Pete full-time now. And spending two to three nights a week keeping company with Stan Kuhl.
I poured the dregs of the coffee into my cup. “You can’t go on like this,” I said.
“If you don’t like babysitting, just say so,” she said, primly. “I can afford to have someone else do it.”
“This is not about babysitting and you know it,” I said. “You and Stan can’t keep doing this.”
“Doing what?” She feigned ignorance and then added crudely. “Oh, you mean screwing. Oh, yes, we can, Babs. We can do it a lot.”
“You are not going to dissuade me from talking to you by being smutty,” I told her. “It’s time to either marry Stan or move along.”
“My personal life does not concern you,” she said, very focused and businesslike.
“You’re living in my house. I’m helping raise your child,” I pointed out. “And you’ll always be my daughter. That gives me the right to speak my mind.”
Laney rolled her eyes. “You never fail to take that opportunity, do you?”
“It’s time for Stan to make things right,” I said. “If he has any consideration for your reputation, he needs to show it now.”
“Babs, women these days don’t have reputations,” she said with heaps of pithy condescension.
“You think they don’t? You’re on your way to being the next Judy Bykowski,” I told her. “Is that what you want? Ned Hoffman would rather father a bastard than give her his name. Now she’s living with Renny, cleaning his house and working in his businesses and Renny won’t marry her, either.”
“Maybe Judy wants to be single,” she said.
I shrugged. “Who cares what Judy wants,” I said. “I know you, Laney. I know what you’re made of. I know what you went through with Robert. You want love, commitment, stability. Don’t even try to pretend that you don’t.”
“I’d like to be married to Stan someday,” she admitted.
“Someday is never going to happen unless you get firm with Stan, insist on making it official.”
Laney’s eyes narrowed. I knew I was really annoying her.
“What do you want me to do? Ask him to marry me? I thought you were opposed to women’s lib. Isn’t the man supposed to make the first move?”
“Yes,” I told her. “And he will. But sometimes a fellow needs a little push.”
“I have no intention of pushing anyone,” Laney said. “I don’t have to have a husband. I don’t need a man to define my life. I’m not going to twist Stan’s arm to make him conform to some expectation of yours. You don’t know me, you don’t know Stan, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“I know that making yourself sexually available to a man who has no long-term commitment is the worst kind of low self-esteem behavior.”
“Low self-esteem? Good grief, Babs, you’re talking to me. I’m the woman in this room who actually
was
the Cotton Queen, not just runner-up pretending she was the real deal for all these years. When it comes to low-esteem issues, you’re the clear winner there.”
“I certainly have my problems,” I admitted. “But I’m not some man’s hussy on call, ready to drop my panties whenever it happens to be convenient for him.”
“You look at everything through your own weird, warped view of the universe. You, drop your panties? Not a chance. Tell me, did you ever in your life have sex just because you wanted to?”
I felt myself blushing. “If I did I was very young,” I told her truthfully. “And I’m certain that I never allowed my own carnality to trump my responsibility as the mother of a young child.”
“Give me a break,” Laney said. “My relationship with Stan doesn’t hurt Rachel. She loves Stan. And he loves her.”
I nodded. “I believe he does love her. But that’s not enough to make him marry you. For that he has to love you.”
“What a crappy thing to say!”
“What a crappy reality that it’s time you faced,” I shot back. “Has the man ever once told you that he loved you? Has he even mentioned marriage in casual conversation?”
Laney blanched and I knew I was exactly right. It was killing me to wound her. I felt I had no choice.
“Sweetie, I don’t want to hurt you,” I said. “I love you. But I worry that while you’re wasting time making inroads on this highway to nowhere, you’re not meeting any men who might actually want to marry you, to make a life with you. You’re missing a man who might be interested in being more than Rachel’s buddy, someone who’d be willing to be her daddy.”
She shook her head, refusing to see it. “Stan and I are very happy with our relationship,” she insisted. “We like where we are and how it’s going. When the time is right to move things up another notch, we will. Until that time, you should just butt out. You’re wrong about me and Stan. You’ve got it completely wrong.”
But the weeks turned into months, turned into years and Stan made no move to elevate their now rather well-known affair to anything legitimate. I took no pride in having been right.
In the summer of 1991, the doctors came up with a new name for what ailed Doris. She’d been living with non-A, non-B hepatitis for almost five years when the specialist, Dr. Berlin informed Acee, with a bit too much self-congratulation I thought, that his wife was McKinney’s first case of Hepatitis C, a heretofore unidentified strain of liver inflammation.
“How did she get it?” I asked Acee.
He shook his head.
We were sitting together in the hospital waiting room. He’d brought her into emergency. For several days her belly had been swelling and she looked six months pregnant, but she hadn’t wanted to see the doctor. This morning when her brain was so foggy she couldn’t figure out how to make the toaster work, Acee had finally convinced her that they had to have help.
“She doesn’t have any of the risk factors for this,” he told me. “She’s never had a blood transfusion or used drugs. She’s never had a sexually transmitted disease and she tests negative for all other types of hepatitis. The doctors are stumped. Doris simply shouldn’t have this disease. But she does.”
Acee looked tired. He looked old. He looked scared.
“The doctor assured me that this problem she has with thinking and remembering is temporary,” he said. “The inability of her liver to function properly is causing toxins to build up. One of them is ammonia and it rises and accumulates in the brain, making her muddled.”
I nodded, sympathetically.
“She isn’t able to really eat anything,” Acee continued. “She was down to ninety-three pounds before she started retaining all this fluid. Dorrie weighed one thirty-five when I married her.”
“Oh, I’m sure she was lying to you about that,” I told him, feigning snideness. “Doris weighed one hundred forty pounds if she weighed an ounce. Her hair alone probably accounted for half of that.”
Acee chuckled. I was glad to give him even the briefest of respites from the worries that drained him.
“Thanks for coming here,” he said to me. “I called the boys, they’re both on the road. When I couldn’t get Laney on the phone...well, I know it’s probably not good manners to call my ex-wife to hold my hand. But you’re the closest friend I could think of.”
“I’m glad you called me,” I assured him. “And you’re right, we’ve always been close friends.”
The disease, or what they knew about it, seemed very confusing and complicated. It progressed very slowly, they assured us, but Doris was very far along. They’d only just discovered its existence, but she may have been walking around with it for twenty years. They could treat it with interferons, but the prognosis for someone Doris’s age with her level of infection was very bad.
“The way I like to explain the liver,” Dr. Berlin said, “is that it’s like a window screen. It has lots of little bitty holes. Fluids pass through the liver the way air passes through the window screen. Now, if a fly hits that window screen and dies there, well that plugs up a few holes, but doesn’t really affect the airflow enough to notice. This hepatitis C is like a huge swarm of flies hitting the screen and dying there. There’s so many tiny fly corpses, that everything just backs up on either side, practically nothing gets through.”
Dr. Berlin’s folksy explanation may have worked wonderfully on ignorant, uneducated country people, unfamiliar with modern medicine. I found it condescending at best. And the image of poor Doris filled up with dead flies was extremely disturbing to me and not a bit comforting to Acee.
It was midafternoon when her sons arrived. I waited in the hallway so they could have time with their mother alone. Laney showed up, anxious and frazzled.
“I was in and out of meetings all day,” she told me. “I saw Acee’s number on my phone, but I figured he was just calling me to set up a lunch.”
“It’s okay, Laney,” I told her. “You’re here for him now and I know he appreciates it.”
That was true. When he came back to the waiting room, she ran into his arms. He held her tightly and cried against her hair.
I know that some would say I treated Acee unfairly when I married him. I had even felt that way myself many times, stung by my own guilt. But at that moment, seeing the relationship between father and daughter, I knew that I’d given Acee a gift, a very valuable gift. For that alone, our marriage had been worth it.
Later that evening they did a needle aspiration of Doris’s distended belly. They drew off a liter of fluid making her much more comfortable and able to sleep.
I held her hand and sat with her while the three men and Laney were huddled in the corner, in consultation with the doctor.
“At this point, the only thing I can suggest is a liver transplant,” he told them.
“They transplant livers?” Laney asked. “I’ve only heard about hearts and kidneys.”
“It’s new,” the doctor admitted. “There are only a few hospitals in the country that perform the operation. I’d recommend Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.”
“All right,” Acee said. “So we take her to Baltimore? In an ambulance or what?”
“No, we’ll put Mrs. Clifton on the transplant waiting list,” he said. “I can get her listed there tonight. We keep her here a few days to get her stabilized then we’ll send her home.”
I could hear Acee’s sigh of relief from across the room.
“She gets to come home,” he said.
“Yes,” Dr. Berlin told him. “If...when she gets close to the top of the list, you two can fly up there and wait nearby.”
“Mom’s never been that far from home before,” her eldest son pointed out.
In fact, she never did go that far.
Doris got better and went home. She followed the doctor’s instructions to the letter, trying to get ready for the surgery. It was as if she were in training for the Olympics, and Acee with her. Doris took medication. Watched her diet. She walked every day. She had a couple of bouts of peritonitis and returned to the hospital several times to have fluid buildup drawn off. But she seemed to be getting better.
Then it was all over. She awakened Acee in the middle of the night and told him that something was very wrong, her back felt hot along the line of her kidneys and her lungs were congested like a really bad cold.
He raced her to the hospital. Within an hour she’d slipped into a coma. She died the next day.
L
ANEY
S
OMETIMES
YOU
lose people before you ever fully realize how much they mean to you. That’s how it was with Doris. She was more than just the woman my stepfather had married. In my life she’d been the unmother, the grown-up, worldly-wise female who, unlike my real mother, always knew the right things to say and when to say them.
“Don’t you worry,” she told me once. “Stan really loves you. How can he help it, you’re so good for him. Just give the boy time. I was in love with Acee almost twenty years before he ever thought of marrying me. And most of that time he was married to somebody else.”
I knew she was right. I knew she was. But in the deepest, darkest part of my heart, I feared Babs might be right, too. Stan had gotten comfortable in our relationship. He liked having me as his...ah...girlfriend? too old...companion? too young...date? too insignificant...lover? too much information. I feared that I was, as Babs had so unkindly phrased it, his hussy on call.
That wasn’t really true, either. Our relationship was a good deal more involved than just sex. And Stan never said anything to indicate that that was the major role I played in his life. I was beside him on civic occasions as well as family ones. We took vacations together at Port Aransas. And shared chaperone duties on a Sunday School trip to Six Flags. He showed up at Rachel’s soccer games and patiently sat through her piano recital. And at Doris’s funeral, he was at my arm, quietly, considerately making himself available for whatever I needed. It was more than a lot of women expected from their husbands.
You should be happy with what you have!
I admonished myself.
He’s a great guy and he genuinely likes and cares for you. That should be enough.
It wasn’t.
I was tired of living with my mother, but I’d put off getting my own place. Every time I thought of moving, I thought of moving into Stan’s house. I’d never bothered to change my name, I was still going by Laney Jerrod. I hated that, but I didn’t want to be Laney Hoffman, I wanted to be Laney Kuhl. I was only thirty-three, I was still young enough to have children. I wanted a brother or a sister for Rachel. Stan was the kind of guy who ought to be married. Why didn’t he ask me? It was a mystery. Could I just wait around indefinitely until he decided to tie the knot? Could I risk having him decide to tie it with some woman other than myself?
How do you get a man to marry you?
I thought about the way I got Robert to propose. Just the idea of Stan with another woman made me physically sick to my stomach. I don’t know how I’d forgiven Robert. I don’t know how we lived over that betrayal. But I knew I’d rather stay single than see Stan with someone else.
After the prayers at the cemetery, Doris’s flower-draped casket was lowered into the ground. Her sons and their wives joined Acee in the black limo, I hung back. Not wanting to leave Stan behind.
“Let’s walk,” I said to him.
As nearly a hundred McKinney citizens made their way to cars, Stan and I strolled among the gravestones in silence.
I didn’t really know my way around the cemetery. I’d never spent much time there. I’d certainly never wandered aimlessly reading headstones as I did now. So I certainly surprised myself at having walked directly to my father’s grave.
Thomas Henry Hoffman, 1939–1962
“This is my dad,” I said to Stan.
He wrapped an arm around my waist. “You were very young when he died. Do you even remember him?”
“Yes, a little,” I admitted. “Most of what I remember is when he died.”
“I guess that makes sense,” Stan said. “Really strong emotional moments would make more vivid memories than day to day ones.”
“I guess that’s why my mother didn’t want Rachel at the service. We had a big fight about it last night.”
“I’m so sorry,” Stan said.
I shrugged. “I’d wanted her to come with us, because she and Doris had been close,” I explained. “I thought Rachel deserved some closure. I just hated the idea that Doris would just disappear without a trace and she’d not understand why.”
“Yeah, that does seem very sad,” he said.
“Babs went ballistic when I mentioned it. She has very strong feelings about kids and funerals. I remembered how she’d fought to keep me away from my father’s. She lost her own parents when she was young, I guess she knew that the image of Doris in that open casket would be the one that stayed with Rachel all her life.”
“Your mom is a very wise woman,” he said.
I nodded, accepting that, in some ways, that was very true.
“You’d better not sing her praises too highly,” I said, turning the conversation. “She doesn’t have your best interests at heart.”
“What do you mean?” he asked, smiling, recognizing the teasing note in my voice.
“She keeps nagging me to get you to the altar,” I said, smiling a little too broadly and feeling as if I was perched on a high wire without a net.
His expression changed abruptly to something indecipherable.
A silence lingered between us.
“Are these your grandparents?” he asked, indicating the newer Hoffman graves next to my father’s.
“Yes,” I said. “Grandma died the year Rachel was born and Grandpa only lived a few months after.”
“And this little grave with the lamb?”
“That’s my brother,” I said. “He died as a baby.”
Stan nodded.
“So, do you need to go back to Acee’s house?” he asked me. “I really need to get back to the office.”
“Sure, drop me off at my place and I’ll get my own car,” I told him.
We walked back across the cemetery to where we were parked. I kept smiling, talking, pretending everything was fine. My heart was breaking. He really wasn’t going to marry me. I was just his...whatever I was. And I was never going to be anything more.
I truly didn’t understand it. Every moment we spent together was a testament to his love for me. But he never spoke the words and he never asked for anything permanent.
Over the next few days and weeks, I tried not to care.
I was determined to focus my life on my daughter and my job. Each was, in its own way, perfectly capable of absorbing every moment of my attention. Rachel was the star of her preschool. She had a better vocabulary than most kindergartners. And she’d taught herself to read because Babs kept falling asleep during her bedtime stories.
At work, things were buzzing. The company was in the forefront of creating software programs to capture and clean code with Y2K errors. Back when computers had been new, the internal operating codes were designed with six-figure date bars. March 12, 1965, was stored as 031265. Storage space for detail was at a premium and this seemed perfectly all right. That is until someone began to ask what would happen when January 2000 rolled around. Would the computer think it was January 1900? And if so, what kind of errors might that generate? Everything was hypothesized from bank systems failing to planes falling out of the sky, even to computers inadvertently launching nuclear missiles.
A change was easily rectified in the new systems, but there were so many old systems still in use. Pete had us pouring more and more of our time, our energies and our staff into the project.
It was at this point that he took me aside.
“Laney, I just need a clear signal from you,” my cousin told me. “You have the talent and the ability to be a major player in this company. But executive levels are never part-time or even full-time. They require a complete life commitment.”
“Pete, you know I have a daughter,” I pointed out.
He nodded. “That’s why I’m telling you this,” he said. “I want you to achieve your ambitions. I know you would be good for my company. But you’re important to me as a friend and relative as well as an employee. I don’t want you to make a choice here that you can’t live with.”
“You’re only saying this because I’m a woman,” I told him. “Men have families and they don’t drag them down.”
“Don’t they?” he said. “Name me one chief exec in this country who is raising a child on his own. I’m not aware of any, even among the group that could afford an entire platoon of nannies. The ones that are married don’t even spend time raising their children. They have clear division of labor with their wives. Believe me, I know what I’m talking about.”
I’m sure he thought that he did. He and Sadie had been having a rocky time of it the last few years. She was as successful at her practice as he was with his business. Their children were all teenagers now, a difficult time for parents everywhere, but especially so when both are consumed by jobs they love.
“Think about it, Laney,” he said. “It’s not about the status of women in America, leading the feminist march through the glass ceiling or even having it all. It’s about you and Rachel, your little family. Forget about what you’ve always wanted and try to figure out what it is you want right now. I’ll back you either way.”
I appreciated his support, though I had little time for life introspection. I was back to working very long hours. I’d put in a full day at the office, come home for family time with Rachel and then after she’d gone to bed, I’d pull out my laptop and work until the wee hours of the morning.
Maybe all that was on purpose. I had very little time left for a man in my life.
And the man in my life seemed to have very little time left for me. Stan seemed to be even busier than I was. I did wonder if perhaps he was just seeing someone else, but whenever I’d call him, he was at work. Something was going on with his company, but he never talked about it. At first, I just thought it must be a stressful business cycle. But when it didn’t seem to let up and Stan continued to be silent, stoic and wound very tightly, I finally mentioned it to Pete.
“I think the only person in the country working longer hours than you and me has got to be Stan,” I told him one evening as we were leaving work after 8:00 p.m.
“Yeah, he’s in a pickle, all right,” Pete said. “I hope he didn’t give you a piece of the business for Christmas last year.”
He chuckled and I smiled, but I had no clue what he was talking about.
I couldn’t help thinking about it, though.
By the time I got home, Rachel was already in bed, but she’d waited up to kiss me good-night.
Babs, who’d had a long day herself, headed for the TV in the den.
“I’m going to watch Sipowicz and go to bed,” she told me, referring to the lead character in
NYPD Blue,
her favorite nighttime drama.
“Okay, I’m going to work on a few things,” I said.
But ultimately, I couldn’t. My mind kept going over and over what Pete had said.
I got on the Internet and pulled up the Web page for Kuhl Computers. No help there. It was all fancy flash sequences, the only information was about the capabilities of the machines. No financials were listed at all. Since it was a privately held company, there were no stock prices to graph. And even a search of news stories about the company revealed nothing. But something was happening.
Pete knew about it and assumed that I knew, too.
He assumed that I knew, because I should know. I was Stan’s
whatever
and he should share important stuff with me. But he hadn’t. In fact, as I thought about it. He hadn’t said much to me about anything lately. What did that mean?
I grabbed up my keys and a minute later I was walking to the car. As I drove down the street toward his house, it occurred to me that, like Robert, I might find him with some silicone sister. That thought was terrifying enough to get my foot off the gas pedal. But then I remembered Pete’s words. If big things were happening and I wasn’t in on it, then Stan had already left me. And I might as well find out about it.
There was no car with a “Perfect 10” license plate in front of his house. The lights were all on, although it was now after eleven o’clock. Not a typical time to drop in for a visit. I rang the doorbell.
He answered dressed in a T-shirt and pajama bottoms. His hair was mussed and he looked tired, but I was sure that he hadn’t been asleep.
“Laney? What are you doing here?”
“I’m beginning to wonder about that myself,” I told him. “May I come in, or do you just want to have this conversation on the porch.”
He stepped away from the door and motioned me inside. Once he’d closed it behind me, he sighed heavily.
“Who told you?” he asked.
Not your best icebreaker.
“Nobody has told me, that’s the problem,” I said.
“I always knew it could happen,” he said. “This didn’t catch me unawares. The potential was always out there and I thought that if it ever did turn out badly, well, I’d just start all over. It wouldn’t matter that much, I’d be none the worse for wear. But then we came together and the stakes got higher. Damn, Laney, I’m sorry. I’m really sorry.”
I could hardly breathe.
“So there is someone else?” I managed to get out.
His brow furrowed.
“Someone else?” He looked at me quizzically for a moment and then shook his head. “No, no,” he said. “I resisted all offers. Maybe I shouldn’t have. I might have got out clean with plenty of start-up in my pocket. I knew if they couldn’t buy it they’d kill it.”
Buy it? Kill it? They who? I was confused.
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Just wait a minute. Are you breaking up with me or what?”
He stood suddenly perfectly still. I watched him swallow. Then he raked a hand through his hair and heaved a sigh. “If that’s what you want, Laney,” he said. “I don’t have the energy for a big, scary blowup. If that’s what you want, then suit yourself.”
He stalked off into the house. I stood there alone in the foyer for a moment before I followed him. I found him in the dining room. The area had been turned into a giant office. Files and paperwork completely hid the six-foot-long table. On the sideboard, he’d set up a whole line of computers hooked together paralleling.
“What are you working on?” I asked. “A moon shot?”
“It’s not a joke,” he said. “I may be going down, but I’m going to make this the foulest, most bitter poison pill those bastards have ever tried to swallow.”