The Good Enough Husband (8 page)

“Ben, what are we doing here? I don’t live here. I mean I was only planning to be up here for a week or so. I really like you, but…”

He unbuckled himself, grabbed and held her hands awkwardly over the center console.

“This is not ideal. We have something here, something I want to explore. Let’s see where it goes while you’re here. Can we do that?”

She nodded, powerless to do anything else.

“I’ll call you tomorrow before I leave the clinic. I want to have dinner with you again.”

“Okay, but…” Why was she objecting? They wanted the same thing.

He let go of her hand and put his fingers to her lips. “Life is full of regrets, Hannah. You and I have our fair share. I don’t want to add this to the list.” He leaned in and kissed her soundly before jumping out of the car and sprinting toward his front door. She watched his figure disappear into the storm-muddled darkness.

6

Monday morning Ben called, as he’d promised, and for the next two weeks, Hannah and Ben dated like teenagers, albeit chaste 1950’s teenagers. They’d spent every night together. He’d taken her back to the Cove for dinner—and this time she stayed through dessert. They’d gone to see the only movie playing in Garberville. It was easy not to argue about what to see when there weren’t any choices. She was grateful that it hadn’t been anything with too much sex in it. She didn’t need any more ideas.

He called, picked her up, showed her a good time, and dropped her off at her front door with the briefest of kisses. But Hannah wanted more, a lot more. No matter how many times she’d pressed her mouth hard to his, or slid her hands under his clothes, or ground her pelvis against his in stark invitation, Ben didn’t budge. He always set her back against the door, and said his goodbye.

Tonight, she was determined to get more from him. When he dropped her off after their date, she wanted her urgency to ove
rwhelm him too. If anything was going to happen between them, it had to happen now.

Sunday, she’d start the trip back down the coast because Ha
nnah couldn’t put off going home any longer. Michael was getting antsy, texting her more than once that she’d stayed well beyond her original plan. He was right. It was time to go back to Orange County and put an end to that part of her life. She wanted to come back to Ben free to explore what they were building. But she needed a reason to return. She didn’t want him to forget her.

The difference between driving on the north coast of California was that they actually covered miles in the car instead of marking time in gridlock. Sitting in the cab of the truck watching the acres of roads, farms, and trees go by, sex seemed more and more u
nlikely. They were moving too fast for sex in the car. Agitated, Hannah looked over at Ben in the confines of the vehicle and chastised herself for such a petty concern. She was really lucky.

She was exactly where she wanted to be and with the right pe
rson. Each night had been a surprise and a pleasure, even if it wasn’t as much pleasure as she wanted. Tonight Ben had mentioned they were going to a club, so she ditched her casual shirts, and fished in the suitcase for her one stylish top. It wasn’t dressy by any means, but at least it wasn’t another shapeless Gap cotton shirt. The chocolate brown, off the shoulder sweater dotted with a few sequins complemented her skin tone.

Hannah was surprised when they pulled up to the Blue Monk jazz club in a town called Eureka. The tiny hamlet didn’t look like
it had more than a few thousand people. How could they support a jazz club? She was even more surprised that the place was packed with people of all different ages. Ben pulled out a chair for her, squeezing in next to her at the little round table. The waitress came right away, pressing for their order as the show was about to start. Hannah ordered a scratch margarita. Ben ordered a beer. If tonight’s pattern followed the last few, Ben would nurse that beer much of the night before switching to water. He liked to be completely sober to navigate the roads that wound their way through the giant northern redwoods and sequoias. She admired his safety, but a sober man was hard to seduce.

The band assembled, and started to play. She recognized the first tune immediately. It was her dad’s most popular song.

“Oh my God,” Hannah exclaimed. She picked her bag up from the floor and rifled through the large tote looking for the program she’d been handed at the door. Her turned off phone, lipstick, Leica, Kelly green Kate Spade wallet, and several pens scattered on the table before she found the flimsy piece of blue paper.

“Do you like Shay Morrison?” Ben asked. “Something about your voice reminds me of his. When I saw they were doing a r
etrospective tonight–”

“Shay Morrison is my dad.”

“What?” Ben said too loudly, leaning in closer and accidentally knocking her lip balm to the floor. He scraped the metal chair leg against the wood floor trying to chase it down, a discordant note in a mellifluous room. A nearby patron shushed them. Guilt flooded her. Noisy patrons were hell on musicians.

Hannah grabbed Ben’s hand, stopping his movement. They could deal with all of this later. She held his hand, tapping it to the music as she tapped her own. She closed her eyes and swayed with the music. It was like being at home listening to her dad rehearse. She remembered the nights he’d defied her mom and took her to smoky clubs in Brooklyn and Manhattan—she being the only ten or eleven year old in the crowd. Those were some of her most ch
erished childhood memories. She’d felt so special – like the music was being performed just for her.

When the band broke for intermission, Ben turned to her.

“Your dad is Shay Morrison?” She nodded, still floating on a cloud of melody and memory, unable to pull her lips down from the huge smile she knew graced them. “Do you have your mother’s last name, or is it a stage name?” he asked with innocent confusion.

Hannah crashed right back to earth. Keesling was Michael’s last name. He and his family had been very pushy about the name change. After their “I dos,” she’d no longer been Hannah Morr
ison, photographer. She wasn’t Hannah Morrison, singer and songwriter, either. They’d insisted that she become Hannah Keesling, real estate agent. They’d been there for generations, after all. The Keesling name meant something in Orange County, they’d pointed out relentlessly. She’d given in without much of a fight. A name, she’d had to agree, was not an identity. The lie came to her lips before she could bite it back. “It was my married name.”

Ben looked a little taken aback. “You never mentioned that you’d been married.”

“It was more a youthful indiscretion, than a marriage,” Hannah found herself saying. No way did she want to lie to Ben. He’d had enough lies for one lifetime. She needed to talk her way out of this. “My name is Hannah Caroline Morrison.” Her words tumbled over each other. “Shay isn’t really his first name, you know?” Her body hummed with nervous energy as she talked her way out of a corner.

Nothing in his bemused smile looked like he suspected her.

“It’s Daniel,” she continued on. She could hear herself speaking too rapidly—barely pausing to take a breath.

While chucking all her stuff back into her purse, she launched into the story she’d heard a million times herself.

“My dad was on tour in Ireland back in the late 60s or early 70s when he was just starting to get popular. Anyway, he was doing some sightseeing outside Galway and some guy they were hanging out with dared him to cliff dive.” Ben looked at her astonished. “I know, crazy, right? Anyway, he dove off some cliff in Inis Mor,” she said giving it the Gaelic flair her dad always did when telling the story. “It was like, a ninety foot dive into the Atlantic Ocean. Obviously, he lived to tell the story. I think the guy who dared him never expected him to do it. Anyway, after that the Irish guys they were traveling with called him Shea—which means ‘hawk like,’ or ‘admirable,’ or something like that depending on who’s telling the story. It was Americanized when the whole episode was written up in Rolling Stone, and he’s gone by it ever since.”

Hannah was grateful to see the band reassembling on the stage. It would mean that Ben wouldn’t probe her on her marriage, and
she wouldn’t have to make up any more lies or tell any more half-truths.

She had another couple of margaritas, hoping they would relax her. She had to put a period on the end of her relationship with Michael. While the band went back in time to the music of Miles Davis, Hannah made up her mind. She was definitely going back to Orange County on Sunday. No more delays. She started making lists of what she’d need to do: look for a divorce lawyer, talk to her parents and break the news to them, put the house on the market, look for her own place to live. She closed her eyes as her head swam. Whether it was the three tequila-heavy margaritas or the prospect of her future that caused her dizziness, she didn’t know.

Ben grabbed her hand. The gentle and reassuring touch of his hand strengthened her resolve. “Are you okay?”

She wasn’t. “Can we go home? I think I’ve had too much t
equila.”

She must have dozed off because Ben was pulling up to the house in what felt like minutes after they left Eureka.

“I’ll walk you in,” Ben said, his tone brooking no argument.

“Thanks,” she said. There was no reason she couldn’t trust him not to take advantage of her compromised state. Trusting herself was still something she was working on.

He led her up to the master bedroom, one strong arm around her waist.

“What do you wear to bed?”

She pointed to a large UCLA t-shirt, lying across the wicker chest at the end of the bed. Ben undressed her in the most clinical manner, pulled the soft cotton sleep shirt over her head. Drunkenly, she mused that all of his patients were naked. He was pretty good at dressing and undressing for someone whose only act of disrobing was likely shaving fur from dog’s legs and cat’s bellies. She laughed out loud, probably confirming for him her inebriated state. He stood to leave. She grabbed his hand, pulling him back down to the bed. The muddle in her head cleared out a bit. She needed to tell him this, now.

“Ben, I’m leaving on Sunday.”

***

Ben knew it was coming, but that didn’t mean those four little words didn’t hit him like a punch in the gut. He had been preten
ding that Hannah was just a lady in town that he’d been dating. But this little time bomb had been ticking in the back of his mind for the last two weeks. And now it was exploding. He really liked her. He thought he could love her if he had the time to get to know her and find out if he could trust her. What was he going to do to get her to come back to the Lost Coast, and to him?

***

The chime of the doorbell started Hannah’s heart racing. Ben. She banished the thought from her head. The small clock in the lower right hand of her laptop screen told her it was too early for Ben. It was one in the afternoon. Ben should be at work. It was the day he did scheduled surgeries. Who else would come knocking at her door now? It wasn’t as if anyone knew her here. Her heart crashed to a stop. Maybe Michael hadn’t heeded her request and had found his way up here.

Determined, she walked to the door. Only after she pulled it open did she consider that she should have peered through the glass and asked who it was. She was behaving like the worst too
stupid to live horror movie heroine. But there wasn’t an axe murderer on the threshold, just a smartly dressed older woman with a cap of carefully tamed curls.

“Hi,” Hannah said, question in her voice. “Can I help you?”

The woman extended her hand assertively. Hannah felt compelled to grasp the small hand in a shake. “So you’re Hannah,” she said, Brooklyn accent as thick as if she’d run into her on Fulton Street. The diminutive woman nodded approvingly. “I’m Elaine Cooper, Benji’s mom.” Mrs. Cooper’s voice transported her home for a fleeting moment. Ben had his mother’s hair.

“Oh. Come on in.” Hannah stepped back, extending a welco
ming hand. She was in the woman’s house after all. Of course, she should invite her in. She stood with this complete stranger for a long, awkward moment. “Did you drive up from Davis alone? Is Ben’s father with you? I’m sorry I don’t know your husband’s name,” she said filling the empty space with chatter.

“Dr. Walter Cooper. I dropped him off in town to have lunch with some friends.”

Cody chose that moment to race into the room. He’d no doubt heard the doorbell ring, but had been working on nosing his way in through the partially closed sliding door. Hannah was quick to grab his collar to prevent him from jumping on Ben’s mom. Paw prints on her tailored gray wool pants or fitted cream-colored linen jacket would make a bad first impression.

Clumsily, Mrs. Cooper patted the dog on the flank. She was not a dog person.

“Well, he looks like a nice dog,” she said, stepping back out of Cody’s orbit. “Is he a Lab mix?”

“Cody’s half Lab, half Australian Shepherd. He’s dog and people friendly,” Hannah declared defensively. Cody was a nice dog in a world where people treated most of the canine persuasion like frothing pit bulls ready to attack.

They both stood in the front hall ill at ease for what felt like years. The only sounds in the room were the dog’s panting and the seawater crashing against the shore. What was this woman expecting of her? Why was she here? Her years with Michael had made her adept at avoiding traps sprung by the older set. Adroitly, Hannah didn’t voice her questions. It seemed extremely rude to make those kinds of inquiries when she was living in the woman’s house and dating the woman’s son. She towered over the pint-sized woman. Ben must have gotten his height from his father’s side.

“Have you had lunch? I was going to throw together a salad for myself,” Hannah said, her manners taking over.

Elaine’s shoulders relaxed a little. “That would be great. Can you leave my dressing on the side?”

Hannah looked at Elaine’s trim figure. She was in great shape for a woman who had to be in her mid-sixties, by all counts. She walked to the kitchen and got the salad fixings from the fridge. Nothing more than store bought lettuce, some canned corn, corn chips, chicken breast, and diced avocado. She tossed her own i
mpromptu southwest salad with ranch and salsa. Careful not to sully Mrs. Cooper’s leaves with gobs of oily dressing, she brought it all to the table, along with a bottle of ranch for Elaine.