The Good Enough Husband (13 page)

“You smell like gas,” he said when she got back into the car.

“I’ll wash my hands at your parents’ house.”

Michael cracked his window. Her ears popped with the uneven cabin pressure throughout the forty-five minute drive to the Kees
lings’ Fullerton home. By the time they made their way through the gates of the new development and up to the cookie cutter house, the smell of food on the barbecue overwhelmed the lingering scent of gasoline.

She had helped Maggie and Drake buy this house, but had no idea why they’d picked it. It was one of those neighborhoods that had popped up on an old orange grove overnight. Every fourth house was exactly the same, each stucco box painted some shade of tan or brown that was supposed to complement the landscape, but stuck out like blight against once fertile fields. There were no trees to speak of, but plenty of vast green lawns that sucked up precious Colorado River water by the tens of thousands of gallons. She wouldn’t have been able to tell their house from any other if it weren’t for the twin Trojan and American flags flanking the e
ntrance.

Without knocking, they opened the door to the vast two story entry way, past the zillion-inch built-in flat screen televisions, and past the kitchen with its wall to wall distressed country cabinets
and ubiquitous stainless steel appliances. The Keeslings’ home didn’t much differ from the model a few streets over. But they loved the house and prided themselves on being able to pay for it outright. In their minds, they’d achieved the American dream. To her, it all looked rather hollow.

As Hannah had feared, their faces were the epitome of symp
athy and concern. Maggie ushered them through the sliding glass doors, each hand rubbing motherly circles on their backs.

“We’re so sorry to hear the news,” she said as soon as they’d sat at the wood slatted outdoor dining table.

“It’s okay,” Hannah said automatically.

“But it’s really not, is it?” Maggie said. “Matthew is never going to have kids, so Michael was our only hope.” Matthew was Michael’s older brother, and Hannah’s favorite Keesling. She’d spent a lot of time with him and his partner when they’d been up in L.A. A bit awkward with their parents, he didn’t come down much.

“Matthew and Kendall have talked about adopting, so you never know,” Hannah said. Michael gave her a hard blue-eyed stare. Provoking them was a habit she’d promised to break. Only she’d wanted to throw the spotlight off herself for a while.

“It’s not really the same, Hannah. You know that. Who knows what kind of child Matthew would get. And being raised up there in West Hollywood…” Drake said, grill side.

“Dad, we haven’t ruled out adoption, ourselves,” Michael said quietly. This was the most he’d ever challenge his parents. He talked a good game when they were by themselves, but he went from lion at home to pussycat when it came to his parents.

Drake stepped back from the grill, tongs still raised. “I told you, you need a second opinion. No man in our family has ever had a problem down there. I’m sure that someone at Hoag M
emorial could fix you right up—and you and Hannah could get back to the business of baby making.” He gave them a broad wink, turning and basting the ribs.

Dr. Stern was one of the foremost experts and if he said it couldn’t be done, then Hannah believed him. An image of Ben flashed across her mind. It was all a moot point anyway. Her days of trying to make a family with Michael, trying to make the Kees
lings her family, were over.

Drake turned back, wiping sauce from his hands on the ‘Kiss the Cook’ apron that he favored. “Wow, nothing from you, Ha
nnah. You usually disagree with everything I say.” She’d spent too many hours over the past few years trying to convince Drake Keesling of the error of his ways. He wasn’t going to vote Democrat, he wasn’t going to drive a more reliable car, and he wasn’t going to buy a house better suited for a retired couple. He was going to do what he wanted, and that was his right. She needed to move on to more like-minded people.

“I’m not in the mood to argue with you today.”

Her response deflated him somehow. Until then, she’d never thought that her relationship with him thrived off their animosity.

“Dad, we trust the guys at the Pacific Center. Hannah’s barely been home for twenty-four hours. We haven’t yet discussed all the alternatives.”

Her phone vibrated in her back pocket. Ben. She pulled it from her jeans, and there it was, his seven-zero-seven area code. Stepping away from the table, she tossed over her shoulder, “I have to take this.” In less than three seconds, she went out the front door, and walked toward a bright green bench in the development’s pocket park.

“Ben.” His name on her breath was a prayer for salvation.

“I had a break from surgery.” Hannah couldn’t think of a thing to say. When she’d been a kid, she’d thought tangible objects could be sent through the holes in the heavy plastic telephone. She’d been disabused of the notion when she’d once unscrewed the receiver and all the food she’d sent her touring father fell out in a heap of stale crumbs. Knowing better, she still wanted to reach through the phone and touch him, pull him to her across the transmission lines. Every bone in her body ached for him. “How’s Cody?”

“He came out like a champ. We even went for a hike this mor
ning.” It was a little fib.

“What are you up to now?”

“Some people I know put together a little barbecue welcoming me back. I couldn’t really get out of it.”

She heard the scratchy sound of something like an intercom in the background. It muted whatever he was saying to her. “…there’s an emergency here, I have to go. I’ll talk to you later.” The call disconnected, ending as abruptly as it had begun. Hannah sat for as long as she reasonably could without being rude.

“What took you so long?” Maggie asked.

“Work call. Even though I turned over most of my listings to other agents, they still have a lot of questions.” She had received several calls like that recently even if this call wasn’t one of them.

“I think it’s such a shame that you’re giving up on this. Selling houses is the perfect job for raising children. It keeps your hand in the career world, but you can fit in time with your kids for all the mommy activities with young ones,” Maggie said as if she hadn’t said this time and again over the last six months as Hannah had wound down. Maggie had occasionally worked as a receptionist in a real estate brokerage and still saw herself as a career woman.

Hannah dropped her carefully applied mask of civility. “I fuc
king hate real estate, Maggie,” she said emphatically.

Michael’s mother covered her ears in horror.

“Oh, Maggie, please with the act. You have HBO. I’m sure you’ve heard a little cursing in your life.”

“You know we don’t like that kind of language in our house,” Drake said as if she were thirteen, not thirty-seven.

“I’m sorry if I’ve offended you, but I’m tired of pretending. I hate selling tacky little boxes. I hate all the code about living in the ‘right’ neighborhood with the ‘right’ schools—when all they mean is that they
don’t
want to live next door to someone like me.”

Maggie’s face turned red. “Oh, that’s not true. We referred all of our friends to you. They sang your praises.” Maggie and Drake had referred all their golf and yacht club friends. And she’d worked for them like a dog, yielding to their every whim. What had appeared generous at first, now felt no more than a means to control her. A way to keep Michael tethered to this life in Orange County.

“Sure they did. I did a great job for them, no matter how I felt personally. And it’s absolutely one hundred percent true what they felt about me. I’m glad to have washed my hands of the whole damned thing.”

“If you think that, then maybe it’s best,” Maggie’s lips pressed into a thin crimson line.

“You know what I remembered about myself while I was up North? I remembered that I’m an artist. I can’t tuck that away when it’s inconvenient for you all. I want to take photos again. I want to sing.”

“Don’t you think you’re a little old for that?” Drake asked. “Even Britney Spears is a little old for it, and she’s got to be half your age.”

They knew she was sensitive about her age. It was one of the reasons she’d felt such an urgency with the whole baby making thing. “I’m not planning on being a teeny bopper pop star doing acrobatics at the Pond. I’d like to write some songs, maybe get on stage once in a while. My dad still performs.”

“Are you going to live off Michael then?” They’d always int
imated that she’d married Michael for the money. Now that the gloves were off, their true feelings emerged.

“How we spend our money and conduct our marriage is our business.” She’d waited years for Michael to say this to them. T
oday, she was taking the initiative.

“You’ve always acted like money didn’t mean a thing. Esp
ecially with Michael making the bulk of it.”

“I’m an artist, not a capitalist. Happiness and fulfillment are more important than money.”

“That’s easy to say when you don’t have to put food on your own table,” Drake said, gesturing toward the food he was taking off the barbecue. The cost of this dinner had gotten too high.

She held her hand up, Jerry Springer style. “You know what? I’m done.” Hannah picked up her phone, purse, and walked through the patio door. “I’ve put up with this for years, and I’m done.” If she was burning bridges, then so be it. Sparing Michael’s feelings was no longer her top priority. “If there was one thing I learned in the last two weeks, it was that it’s best to be honest.”

She’d started up the car and was about to put it in gear when Michael came running out. He knocked on the passenger window. She put the car back in park. With one push of the button, Michael came into full angry view.

“What’s up with you?”

“What’s up with me? How many times have we had this conversation, Michael? Your parents treat me like the bastard stepchild, and I’m supposed to put up with it.”

“I think you really hurt their feelings.”

“Hurt
their
feelings? I’m… They… Forget it. I’m not going to bother with this argument. Are you getting in the car or not? I’m leaving. Now.” Michael looked back at their house longingly before he opened the car door and got in.

She’d finally stood up for herself. It was too bad that Michael looked like a boat tossed around in a storm. She could see from the squint of his eyes and the set of his jaw that he was angry. But he didn’t like confrontation and would never tell her that. Instead, he froze her out for the next week, and that was fine with her. Hannah
had spent the time opening her own bank accounts, researching her legal options, and thinking about how she could get back to Ben.

After a week of silence, Hannah still tensed when she heard Michael come into the house. Instead of ignoring her and going right to the bedroom, he came into the family room. She’d been mindlessly flipping through the nine million satellite channels they subscribed to, plotting her escape.

“Truce,” he said, sliding next to her on the couch so they sat hip to hip. She turned away from some celebrity chef who was doing more yelling than chopping on the Food Network, and looked at Michael. She wasn’t mad at him. She was mad at herself for letting all of this—the fertility doctors, the move to Orange County, the real estate, his family—go too far.

Years ago when she was burned out from trying to make her mark in New York City, arranging her own marriage had seemed like a good idea. After all, families had been bringing together their progeny for generations and those marriages seemed no better or worse than those people chose for themselves. She’d thought choosing a man for whom she’d felt no passion, but for whom she’d had warm fraternal feelings would be the best way to go.

Because he couldn’t break her heart. Because he didn’t have it to begin with. He’d be a good father. She could build the kind of family she’d always craved—normal, happy…together.

“Truce,” she said, holding out her hand. They shook like stra
ngers. He fished the remote control from the linen upholstered couch cushions and turned off the TV, thrusting the room into silence and near darkness.

“I got you something.”

A rush of guilt swarmed her body. “You didn’t have to.”

“I know I didn’t have to. I wanted to.”

“What is it?”

“It’s in the bedroom.”

Michael had dimmed the lights in the master, and lit a fire warding off the chill in the fall air. He wanted to go to bed with her. In a marriage as long as theirs, subtlety disappeared quickly. Until she’d met Ben, she’d assumed that her diminished libido had been a function of age. Now, she had to face the truth. She looked around the room for a trap door she could plunge through, like Lucy Pevensie slipped through C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe.

Michael sat in a chair and produced a manila folder and a jew
elry box. Hannah’s unrealistic hopes were dashed. Neither of them were disappearing.

“Which should I open first?”

He paused to consider. “The box.”

She lifted the lid of the midnight blue velvet box and a small charm bracelet sat atop a silk cushion. She lifted the delicate silver chain from its perch and two little charms jingled. She fingered them and realized they were a tiny old-fashioned camera and a small microphone, its head an onyx sphere. Tears gathered at the corners of her eyes. It was really thoughtful. Despite his family and all the downsides, this was why she had married Michael. He thought her dreams were worth pursuing, even if his parents didn’t. He’d never once complained about her artistic nature or her ever-changing careers, working tirelessly for years at various brokera
ges and financial firms to make a very good living for them.