It had a lot to do with everything, as he knew perfectly well. Anybody who’ll cheat with you will cheat on you, too. Marshall heard his father’s words in his memory. Not for the first time, Dad knew what he was talking about, dammit. “Okay,” Marshall said, even if it wasn’t. “I’ll leave as soon as I can pack up my shit and get a car. It was fun while it lasted, wasn’t it?”
“Some of it.” Janine’s mouth twisted. She was gonna be like his sister. She’d erase the good times, so all the bad stuff would be his fault. That sucked, but what could you do? Except move out, anyway?
Kelly grunted when she lifted a box out of the Taurus’ trunk. “What did you put in here?” she asked. “Anvils?”
“That one’s got manuscripts and shit like that in it,” Marshall answered. “A sheet of paper doesn’t weigh anything much, but a box of paper’s heavier than a box of lead. If I did sci-fi, I’d figure out some bullshit reason why.”
“I always thought the same thing. Nice to know I’m not the only one.” Kelly lugged the box to the open front door. Playboy was shut in the laundry room to keep him from getting loose (not punishment—he’d been bribed inside with treats). Deborah, however, remained underfoot. “Get out of the way!” Kelly told her, not for the first time.
“C’mere, kiddo. I’ll read you a story,” Colin called from the front room. Deborah went, but she’d gone before, too. With his bad arm, Colin wasn’t helping Marshall move back in. Not to put too fine a point on it, Kelly’d told him she would break his good arm if he tried carrying stuff.
I’m getting too old for this myself, she thought as she hauled the box up the stairs. She did give Colin a certain amount of credit. He hadn’t gone even slightly I-told-you-so on Marshall. He’d just told him to come back and made sympathetic noises that sounded as if he meant them. Maybe he realized Marshall was beating himself up, and he didn’t have to do it for his son.
Marshall came upstairs right behind Kelly. His mouth wore a sour smile. “Gee, I wonder which way to turn from here,” he said. “I mean, I’ve never set eyes on this hallway before, right?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Kelly said. “You’ve got a roof over your head, and plenty of people don’t.”
“Yeah, yeah.” His nod was sour, too. “I don’t mind being my dad’s son. I’m kinda proud of it, to tell you the truth. But being my dad’s kid… That gets old, you know?”
She did know, or thought she did. If Professor Rheinburg hadn’t pulled strings or twisted arms or whatever he did at Cal State Dominguez, she would be scuffling herself.
“Times are hard,” she said. “What can you do? When your novel sells, things’ll start straightening out.”
“Glad you think so. Janine didn’t feel like waiting.”
“Well…” What was she supposed to say to that? She tried, “When you hooked up with her, you weren’t exactly thinking with the top part of your head, were you?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he answered, deadpan, as Colin might have. Then he did something Colin wouldn’t have in a million years: he grabbed his crotch. Kelly laughed so hard, she almost fell over.
“What’s funny?” Her husband’s voice floated up from below.
“Tell you later,” she said. And she did, after Marshall’s stuff was all in, Playboy was released (his irate meow said that, bribe or no bribe, they had no business living without a cat for so long), and Deborah went off to color or look at a picture book or play with dolls and dinosaurs or whatever else she felt like doing.
Colin chuckled. “He’s got it figured out, too, then. That’s good. If he could’ve seen it sooner—”
“He wouldn’t’ve got laid so much once he moved in with her,” Kelly interrupted.
“Yeah, there is that,” Colin said. “But that doesn’t guarantee a happy ending, not unless you’re from Hollywood and you get to roll the credits before they start arguing about who didn’t clean up after the party and whose turn it is to take out the trash.”
“So what does guarantee a happy ending, O Sage of the Age?” Kelly asked, perhaps less sarcastically than she’d intended.
Colin reached up with his good hand. “Sorry—have to adjust my turban so the reception’s better,” he explained. Kelly rolled her eyes. He went on, “Dumb luck has a lot to do with it: finding the right person. Putting up with the annoying stuff the other person does, even if she—he—whatever—is the right one. Knowing that she—he—is gonna put up with your crap the same way. Making up your mind you’re gonna ride it out no matter where it goes. Oh, and being happy in the sack with the other person every once in a while sure doesn’t hurt, either.”
Kelly considered. “Sounds good to me. Doctor Phil can get off the TV now. Look out for Doctor Colin.”
“Look out, is right,” he said. “So how are we doing?”
She spread the fingers on her left hand. The diamonds in her wedding ring weren’t humongous, but they were sparkly. “I like it fine so far. Why don’t you ask me again in about thirty years?”
“Okay,” he said, and then, in a low voice, “Think Marshall’ll be out of the house yet?”
“As a matter of fact, yes,” Kelly answered. She saw she’d surprised him, but she meant it.
XXI
When Louise fell for Colin, it was girl-meets-boy, the kind of thing that happens to almost everybody. As with an awful lot of people, it was also the kind of thing that got more and more boring as year crawled after year. When she fell for Teo all those years later, it was her Grand Passion, and she went head over heels. It never got boring, not even a little bit. It blew up in her face instead. That was worse. It hurt harder, anyhow—maybe not more, but harder.
When she fell for Jared Watt, she hardly noticed she was doing it. She couldn’t very well help noticing the outward trappings. He took her to soccer matches and to musicals—and, to be fair, to movies and to restaurants, too. They went to bed together. She always made sure they took precautions. This long after James Henry came along, she didn’t think she could still catch. But she hadn’t thought she could when she got pregnant with him, either. So: precautions. Every single time.
The games and the shows and the dinners were only outward trappings, though. For quite a while, even the sex was only an outward trapping. An enjoyable trapping, certainly. Jared always worked hard to please her. That made her want to please him as well. But, for a long time, she thought of the two of them as what her grown kids would have called friends with benefits.
That he was still her boss also complicated things. He went out of his way to assure her she didn’t have to do anything with him. She believed him. If she hadn’t, she would have said no at some point early on to see what his word was worth and whether it was worth anything. All the same, dating somebody who could fire you was interesting in ways she could have done without.
Firing her didn’t seem the first thing on his mind, though. “I sure am glad the power wasn’t working the day you walked in,” he told her one morning. “I’ve said that before, haven’t I?”
“Yes, but I still like to hear it. So am I—for all kinds of reasons,” she answered. Why not? They were the only ones in the drugstore. Business on a cold, rainy winter morning wasn’t going to be brisk.
The power was working now. It let Louise see Jared blush. “Aside from that—” he began.
“Yes?”
“Aside from that,” he repeated firmly, and she let him go on, so he did: “Aside from that, if I had posted my want ad, I would’ve needed to sort through four dozen losers to find three or four possibles, and none of them would have been a quarter as good as you.”