And it wasn't just the stuff. Although to be sure there was plenty of that-furnishings, clothes, jewelry. Beyond that, Kathy's life was so smooth, so effortless, so serene. And why wouldn't it be? She'd gotten it exactly right in making the single most important choice of her life-the man she had married. Chuck Novio, tenured professor of American history at San Francisco State University, was one of the most effortlessly gifted men Janice had ever met. Kathy had snagged him soon after he transferred here from back East. Whip-smart, tall, trim, athletic, and funny, he also possessed a calm strength and sensitivity that seemed to rub off on Kathy and on their well-behaved twelve-year-old twin daughters, Sara and Leslie.
It was only because of this comparison that Janice sometimes let herself sink into self-pity that in turn primed the pump of her recurrent bouts of self-loathing. She knew about these things, about how they worked-after all, she was a psychiatrist. In reality, in real life, she was not any kind of a loser herself-she knew that. And neither were her husband, Michael, or any of their own three children, Jon, Peter, and Allie. It's just that Michael ran his own business, a UPS franchise on Union Street, and the stress of that took its continual toll, making him sometimes seem much older than his forty-one years. And add to that, the kids were all in high school now at the same time. Three teenagers in the home did not generally equate to much serenity.
Janice stood in front of the sink with the cold water running over her hands and into the colander of peeled potatoes. Through the window, Chuck and Michael and the boys were playing touch football in the late-afternoon sunlight. She went still and sighed.
"Janice? Is everything all right?"
"Fine," she told her sister. "Everything's fine. Just looking at them playing out there. They grow up so fast, the boys, don't they?"
"That's funny." Kathy came over and stood next to her. "You see your sons growing up and I see our husbands staying young, still boys themselves in a lot of ways."
"That's probably a healthier way to look at it."
"I don't know about healthier. It's just how I see it."
"It's healthier, trust me." She turned off the running water and put her hands on either side of the sink, leaning her weight into them.
Kathy touched her arm. "Are you sure you're okay?"
Janice shook her head. "It's just been a long week." Now she straightened up. "I'm sorry. I'm just so glad we're here, getting this break out of our house. And Sunday night dinner is always great. I don't mean to be a downer."
"You're not."
"Well, I'm not exactly Pollyanna, either." She glanced outside again. "I should be happy Michael's even out there with Chuck and the boys at all. This whole past week it's almost like he's been paralyzed. And in our house, with everybody on top of one another, moods tend to pile on up. So everybody's been a little snappy." She broke a brittle laugh. "Did I say a little snappy? I mean I know why it's smart we don't keep guns in the house."
"Janice. Come on."
"Well, not really, of course." Janice dried her hands on a dish towel, then handed it to her sister. Crossing over to the island, she pulled out a stool for Kathy, then sat on one herself. "But let's just say it's good for us all to be here and out from under each other's feet for a few hours."
"What's Michael been paralyzed about? Work?"
"No. Work's been good. Christmas was way better than anybody predicted. Crazy busy but good."
"So. What? Not you guys?"
"Well." Janice paused. "We've been better, I suppose, but I don't think it's that, either. Does the name Ro Curtlee ring a bell?"
Kathy scrunched her face in concentration for a second. "No. I don't think so. Who is he?"
"Remember the jury Michael was on, like, ten years ago?"
"Vaguely. Although ten years ago I had two-year-olds and everything was pretty much a blur. Michael was the jury foreman or something, right?"
"Right. And they found Ro guilty and sent him away."
"Good. Right. I remember now. But then his parents came after you, something like that."
"Exactly like that." The memory was still all too clear to Janice Durbin: When the newspapers did interviews with the other jurors after the trial, it came out that Michael had played a prominent role in getting the guilty verdict. The jury had started out at only 50 percent for conviction, but Michael kept at them in the deliberations and finally got the other six to go along with him and vote guilty.
When the Curtlees realized this, they set out to destroy her husband, and nearly succeeded. At the time, he'd worked for one of the city's big law firms as a word processing supervisor, a daytime job that left him time for his painting. The Curtlees had connections with the people he worked for and Durbin got accused of a lot of mischief-stealing supplies from the storeroom, using the firm's computers for his own work-until he got fired. He received no severance after seven years of employment and was told he was lucky they weren't prosecuting him criminally.
Finally, after a Courier article on Durbin the hypocrite vigilante and now thief who'd railroaded Ro Curtlee into jail, he found himself blackballed in the legal firms and couldn't get work for almost a year. Couldn't find the heart to get back to his painting.
Janice sighed. "I think having to abandon the painting was the hardest thing."
"That was a bad time," Kathy said. "I'd almost forgotten all about it. And his painting."
"Well, Michael hasn't. He's never really come to grips with having to quit that."
"Three kids," Kathy said.
"I know. But still…" Her mouth tightened at the memory. "It's a miracle he eventually got the UPS franchise, somehow under the Curtlees' radar. At least we thought they were more or less forever out of our lives."
"They're not?"
"They might be. We hope so. But maybe not."
"Why not?"
"Because last week some idiot judges let Ro out of prison on appeal, and another moron of a judge here in town gave him bail while he's waiting for a retrial, and now he's out. Ro, the convicted murderer, walking around free as a bird. And Michael's thinking it's all going to start again, that everything he went through, everything we went through, was all just in vain. And the idea, as I said, just paralyzes him. If Ro's out again, then Michael's stand with the jury basically made no difference. It was all just a big cosmic joke." Out in the street, Michael Durbin took the hike from his younger boy, Peter.
When they'd been choosing up sides, Durbin had almost as a matter of course chosen Peter to be his teammate against Uncle Chuck and Jon. Both boys were athletic, but Jon had an indefinable special something as well as-much as he tried to deny and even hide it-a special place in Durbin's heart. Though he loved both of his sons and tried to treat them exactly equally, Durbin and his firstborn shared a natural simpatico and deep connection that Durbin knew might prove hurtful to his very sensitive younger son if he let down his guard and inadvertently revealed his instinctual favoritism.
It was a lifelong struggle.
So whenever he got the chance-as here choosing who would be his teammate-Durbin leaned over backward to pick his younger son over his older. He knew that Jon intuitively understood why Durbin did this, why he almost always appeared to favor Peter. The insecure younger boy needed the overt signs, the trappings of his father's love and approval. Jon did not. It wasn't something he and his dad had to talk about. They simply "got" each other.
Now Durbin faded to his left with the football as his brother-in-law, Chuck, started counting to five at the scrimmage line and Peter raced down the street, cutting first right, then left, trying to shake his brother Jon's coverage. When Durbin saw Peter cut back again, gaining a step on Jon, he threw a high arching spiral that led his younger boy perfectly.
Or almost perfectly.