Those We Love Most (15 page)

Margaret could still recall exactly where the old boarding pass was, although she had never felt the inclination to look at it again. There were moments she would think of it, comingled in that drawer with the history and documented achievements of her loved ones, and wonder if J was still in Roger’s life. Or was there someone new? She had contemplated destroying the boarding pass, but in the end there was a twisted, inexplicable comfort, almost a security, in its secret possession. Roger had certainly forgotten it ever existed, and the carelessness of that, his disregard for her, was something best left unacknowledged.

Roger looked at his watch again in the crowded downtown restaurant. The associate he was meeting was now a half hour late. Ten or even fifteen minutes was acceptable with traffic, but this was ridiculous. Could the man have forgotten? He began to dial his secretary when a younger couple brushed past him, following the maître d’ clutching oversize menus, and the table jostled so that his water glass spilled. His mild annoyance bubbled over into open frustration. After this lunch meeting he had hoped to get over to Maura’s house, maybe take Ryan out to the backyard and play catch before the weather completely turned. Work was in a lighter phase between deals, and he was pleased to have the extra time to focus on his grandson.

There was something so needy about Ryan now. At seven he was intensely curious about the world, and yet his loss, his sorrow, Roger sensed, was not always tended to by his parents, Pete in particular. Pete seemed to have retreated slightly since James’s death—there but not there, present but not actively so. He wondered idly if Pete had even thrown a ball with Ryan in the months since the accident.

Roger had smelled alcohol on Pete’s breath at odd times on more than one recent occasion, but he had kept his comments to himself. There had been one evening, after a family dinner, when he and Margaret had observed Maura trying to wrestle the keys out of Pete’s palm. Pete had grabbed her arm angrily. Roger had come close to intervening, but in the end he had exercised restraint. Everyone was hurting in different ways, he reasoned. Still, the urge to protect his daughter had flared, but the normally easy channels of their more intimate conversations had changed with the death of James. He would not raise the subject with her.

“I’ve been waiting here thirty minutes, Cristina,” Roger sputtered into his cell phone in the restaurant, scanning the line of suits at the hostess stand in the front. “I’m about to leave.”

“Tomorrow,” his secretary said, after pausing to consult his schedule. “The lunch you set up with Mr. Pittman is tomorrow,” and Roger swore under his breath.

“OK, my mistake,” and he snapped the phone shut. He must have written it on the wrong day. He’d done that with one or two other appointments he’d arranged himself in the past few months, mixed up a few times or dates. He’d continued to write it off to stress, to the terrible crushing weight they had all endured, were still enduring really, in the wake of James’s death. Roger waved the waiter over with a hurried gesture and requested the bill for his iced tea. He would grab a hot dog off the street cart and bring it back to the office. He’d had enough of the noise and the loud laughter inside the restaurant. The acoustics were terrible. It was one of those yuppie, hanging-fern-and-brass restaurants that seemed to come and go in downtown Chicago with regularity.

Pushing through the revolving door of the restaurant at the base of a glass and steel tower, Roger hitched up his trousers and adjusted, for a moment, to the early November temperatures outside.

He felt the buzzing of his cell phone and reached for it in his inside coat pocket. It was Julia. Images of her flooded into his head in muted colors. He could see the curve of her shoulder and the swell of her freckled breast. He envisioned the way her chin tilted upward, exposing the vulnerability of her neck when she laughed. Julia’s kind of woman was the equivalent of instant gratification, immediate payoff. And then he felt unaccustomed shame for the moment, shame in his failure to please her when he was last in Tampa. He’d been tired, still very much grieving. The phone’s insistent buzzing bloomed into a ring, and he was still for a moment, deciding whether or not to answer. With a sigh, he pushed the button.

“Hello?”

“Hi, Roger, it’s me. Is this a good time?” Her words came out in a waterfall rush.

“It’s fine. Yes. Julia, how are you, love?” Roger’s voice softened imperceptibly, his features relaxed. Julia’s voice still had a soothing effect on him, a tonic.

“Missing you. God, I’d love to see you.”

“Me too. I’ve got to get back down there soon, but for now I’m grounded here in Chicago.”

“You and your deals.” She laughed in an attempt to be breezy, but a slice of bitterness edged in. She was working hard to contain it, he could tell. One of the things that had attracted him to Julia when they had met at a hotel beach bar five years ago was her complete absence of extracting promises and pressing demands. It was as if, submissive and compliant, she was grateful to take whatever scraps he could offer, counting herself fortunate simply to have someone in her bed from time to time.

Before meeting Julia, Roger had had only occasional one-night stands, to which he had never given much thought. The night he met Julia he imagined it would also be a single event, but something about her energy and vivaciousness had captivated him, and they had exchanged phone numbers. She offered the promise of spontaneity and joy, two things that had dimmed in Roger’s marriage. And then she had been seductively persistent, calling him regularly after that first encounter, entertaining but never insistent. He had found himself more and more eager to see Julia and had begun inventing business reasons to return to Tampa more frequently than was probably necessary. Five years of secret liaisons and furtive phone calls had passed with very little effort on his part. But right now his relationship with Julia was suffocating, it felt sticky and weighted, as if he were carrying rocks on his back as he tried to retreat. He continued the phone conversation with some basic chatter, remembering to ask a few polite questions, always the gentleman, he thought impatiently, and then he rang off with some excuse about a meeting.

How could he possibly tell her, or did she already know, that somehow in that moment of their conjoined pleasure a stain had begun to spread over what they’d shared. He had felt it when he was last with her, as they lay together. It had grown and hardened like a small stone in the center of Roger’s chest. In some way it was as if his being with Julia when James was hit had made them both complicit in the tragedy.

She was still three blocks from the upholsterer’s house when an SUV pulled out of a spot in front of a redbrick church wedged in between the row houses on Chicago’s northwestern margins. Recessed into the facade of the narrow parish church was a concrete statue of Mary, veiled head bowed with clasped hands. There were more than forty minutes left on the parking meter, a gift from the previous owner. Margaret needed the walk anyway; she’d been spotty about getting to her exercise class, and the sun was making an effort to poke through the slate gray November sky. As she strolled purposefully, she assessed the slight sense of decay and dilapidation in the once industrious neighborhood. When they had first moved to the area it had been largely Irish Catholic and now it appeared tired; it was hard to tell exactly who lived here.

The houses here were smaller with cement steps and aluminum siding. They were working families’ homes, and yet there was still neatness and pride of ownership in the majority of the orderly porches and small front lawns. Greengrocers and the occasional laundromat or shoe repair storefront were interspersed between the row houses. Window boxes on the facades had been emptied for the season, and the small patches of earth around the leafless trees in the sidewalk cement were barren, lending the streets an air of abandonment.

Margaret caught a quick glimpse of him, a flash of recognition as she rounded the corner on the upholsterer’s street. Walking by the window of the neighborhood bar, at first she thought her mind was playing tricks on her, but something in the man’s expression, his profile, made her catch her step and slow. Sure enough, it was Pete. She was certain of it now. In the middle of a workday, miles from his office.

Margaret shifted her purse and stepped just to the right of the window and pretended to busy herself looking for keys while surreptitiously studying her son-in-law. He was slumped over the wooden bar onto his elbows, ossified eyes staring ahead at the ESPN announcers. The position of the dartboard on the wall behind him made it appear that his head was framed in the bull’s-eye.

From her vantage point at the side, his eyes held neither interest nor disinterest; they were numbly fixated on a pilsner glass of beer, the foam still frothy at the head. Above her, a noisy filtration system cranked smoky, stale air back into the street, and Margaret wrinkled her nose in distaste. It was a typical Chicago neighborhood bar, the kind of place you didn’t look at twice, with sticky counters and dried ketchup on the tables. But this wasn’t Pete’s neighborhood, and moreover, the fact that he was alone in the middle of the day seemed pitiful and curious. She wondered if Maura had any idea where he was, and then the unsettling thought flitted in. Margaret wondered how much her daughter would care.

Margaret chided herself. These were tough times for the family, for the couple. They all needed to find ways to cope, and whatever was happening currently in Maura’s marriage was not really any of her business. None of her business, that is, unless someone was getting hurt or the kids were involved. Right now, though, Pete was a man having a drink alone at a bar, and it was better left like this, without remark.

Margaret bent her head again and moved briskly past the building. The last thing she needed was to have Pete spot her. But the image of her son-in-law, alone on the barstool, dully worshipping a glass of beer in the middle of the day, was unsettling. Pete had always enjoyed his beer, he was definitely a party person, but Margaret had noted a marked increase in his consumption since her grandson’s death, at least from her limited vantage point. There had been one disturbing night recently when she had observed Maura and Pete tussling over who would drive home after a family dinner, and she had busied herself elsewhere as the tenor of Maura’s voice rose firmly. It had been painfully intimate, too uncomfortable to watch.

Margaret continued briskly on to the upholsterer, examined the pillows, and wrote her out a check for the work. What to leave in and what to leave out? Margaret wondered, her mind pivoting back to Pete as she stepped off the front stoop of the small beige house and walked toward the car, carrying two plastic bags with the newly covered couch accent pillows. As she opened the sedan’s back door to place them inside, her eye lingered on the concrete Mary and the simple carved wooden doors of the church. On impulse she pressed the lock button on her key chain, heading purposefully up the front steps and into the darkness of the church’s interior. It took her eyes a few moments to adjust, and she observed that this was a more simple church than their hometown parish, despite the glory days of the Catholic Church in Chicago. One large stained-glass window loomed above the altar with a depiction of Jesus, arms outstretched, and tapestries hung on the whitewashed walls. The interior woodwork was dark-stained mahogany, lending the sanctuary a hushed, somber feeling. A stone baptismal font stood in front, between the rows of pews, and the stale air inside was redolent with incense, ashes, and neglect that could be found in so many city churches today, she thought with nostalgia. Margaret was relieved to find the pews empty, and there was no sign of anyone, including a priest. In the alcove halfway down the aisle, only a handful of low flames flickered in the red glass votive holders, and above the bank of candles was a small wooden statue of Jesus on the cross.

She reached in her wallet and located a twenty-dollar bill, stuffing it into the metal collection box, and took a taper, lighting it first with a candle and then touching it to the wick of a new votive, solemnly observing the flame catch. Margaret bent her head and offered up a simple prayer, asking God to protect Maura and her family. The familiarity of the ritual relaxed her, and when she opened her eyes, she moved to the front of the church, kneeling slightly while steadying herself with the back of the pew. “Father, Son, Holy Spirit,” she said under her breath, as she made the sign of the cross before turning to walk to the back of the church and exit the front doors.

As Margaret drove home she found herself questioning again how much, if anything, to share with her daughter about seeing Pete. It was still a fragile time. And it wasn’t so much that Pete was doing something illicit. She hadn’t caught him with a woman or trapped him in a lie. He was having a drink alone at a bar in the middle of the day. But everything about it felt wrong and desperate.

She and Roger had actually only discussed Pete and Maura a few times since James had died. Where once they spent much of their dinner conversation dissecting, approving, or disapproving of their children’s choices, when it came to Pete and Maura, right now, it was too painful to examine the collateral. But on one recent weekend, when she’d been at Maura’s and Pete had come home tipsy and belligerent from a Bears game, Margaret confided to Roger that she worried about Pete’s drinking. She was concerned, she said, that he was not being as supportive of Maura as he could in the wake of such a tremendous tragedy. Roger had admitted that he too had worries, but he argued that they all needed to give Pete space. The couple had a solid marriage, had logged enough years together to survive losing a child. They would recover, he assured her, and the surest way was for them both to butt out.