Now, sitting in the bar, he met his own gaze in the mirror. To hell with you, he said silently. To hell with all of you. I'm here, and I'm not leaving. Draining the second drink in a single gulp, Ted dropped enough money on the bar to cover the bill and a tip and walked out.
After he was gone, the bartender scooped up the money, dropped part of it in the cash register and the rest of it in his tip jar, then picked up the phone.
"He was here," he said. "And he's drinking."
There was a short silence, and then the recipient of the call spoke. "That's good," Father MacNeill said softly. "Maybe he'll drink himself to death."
Evening lay like a shroud over the house. Janet tried to tell herself that her dark mood was just a result of the weather-the heat and humidity, unseasonable even for mid-September, that wrapped St. Albans like a sodden blanket. The iron determination that Corinne Beckwith's visit instilled in her that morning had begun to erode as soon as Kim and Jared came home from school. Jared tried to put a good face on it, but Kim made no effort to hide her feelings. Her unhappiness, Janet was certain, was heightened by the fact that there hadn't been any sign of Muffin all day.
"Something's happened to her," Kim said as she finally gave up trying to call the missing cat. "She wouldn't just run away."
"Cats can be pretty independent," Janet told her, trying to offer Kim hope for her pet, but at the same time wanting to prepare her for the possibility that the cat might never come back. "Maybe she just didn't like it here, and has found somewhere else to live."
"But she wouldn't do that," Kim protested. "Not Muffin!"
"Well, perhaps she'll come back," Janet told her, and changed the subject. "How was the first day at school?" she asked, and immediately wished she hadn't.
Kim moaned. "It was awful," she said. Opening the refrigerator, she rummaged around for a couple of Cokes, one of which she tossed to her brother. For the next twenty minutes Janet listened to her oldest daughter's account of the twins' humiliation in the first ten minutes they'd been in class at St. Ignatius. "And it wasn't even Jared's fault," she finished. "Sister Clarence never even asked if he wrote the note, and of course he wouldn't tell her he didn't."
"Look how she treated us," Jared said. "And it was our first day in school. If I'd told her Luke Roberts wrote the note, she'd have probably had him expelled, or made him stay after school and say two thousand Hail Marys or something."
Kim rolled her eyes, wondering once again how it was that Jared never seemed to get mad about anything-even someone else getting him in trouble-and always managed to make it sound like he hadn't done anything special. He didn't even seem to be angry at Sister Clarence. "Will you at least admit Sister Clarence is a total creep?"
"Kim!" Janet did her best to glare at her daughter, but as she'd listened to Kim recounting their day at school, a dark suspicion had been growing in her mind that there was more to it than Kim knew.
Father MacNeill.
But surely he wouldn't go so far as to turn a teacher against her own students? Or would he? For the rest of the afternoon the problem gnawed at her, nibbling away at the resolve that had come to her only a few hours earlier.
Then Ted came home, and even before they saw him, they knew what he'd been doing. It was nothing visible; nothing they could hear or smell, taste or touch. But all of them had been living with it for so long that they recognized it the instant he entered the house.
It was the aura of alcohol.
Janet, testing the roast she'd fixed for dinner, caught the look that passed between Kim and Jared. Though neither said a word, she could read their common thought as clearly as if they'd spoken: He's drunk!
Molly began to cry, as if she, too, had picked up the thought-or perhaps detected her father's condition with some internal radar of her own.
Then he came into the kitchen, confirming their unspoken thoughts.
His step was a little too careful, his speech a little too precise.
"Why are you all looking at me that way?" he asked, and the tension in the house notched up as they heard the paranoia in his voice. Neither Kim nor Jared replied, and did their best to neither look at their father nor appear to be trying not to look at him.
Molly's wail rose to a scream.
"Does that child have to howl every time I come into the room?" Ted demanded.
As Janet scooped Molly up from the floor and tried to comfort her, she had to repress the angry words that threatened to spill from her lips: She only does it when you've been drinking! "Dinner will be on in a few more minutes," she made herself say instead.
"Then Jared can unload the car," Ted said, his eyes fixing on his son. "If it's not too much to ask." The last words were spoken with biting sarcasm, warning Janet that an explosion wasn't far away.
"Not a problem," Jared said, already on his feet. Kim, grabbing at the opportunity to escape the ugliness in the kitchen, quickly followed her brother.
"What's wrong with her?" Ted asked. "Do I look like I have some kind of disease or something?"
Once again Janet forced herself to hold her tongue, but when Jared carried inside a large box filled with bottles of liquor, she turned furiously on Ted.
"You said you were going to stop drinking." She struggled to keep her voice under control, and wished she'd found the strength to hold her anger in check until later, when she and Ted would be alone. But it was too late. Ted was already glowering at her.
"Just because it's here doesn't mean I'm going to drink it."
This time Janet did stifle the words that came to mind. But it didn't matter. She'd already set Ted off.
"You all make me sick," he rasped. "Can you blame me for having a drink every now and then, the way you all act?" He picked up the box of bottles, nearly lost his balance, then managed to recover himself. "You want dinner, go ahead and eat it. I'll take care of myself." He disappeared through a doorway that led to a butler's pantry and the big dining room beyond. Jared made a move to follow, but Janet stopped him.
"Don't. Just leave him alone. Maybe at least the rest of us can enjoy our dinner."
But of course they couldn't. The pall over the house grew heavier, and though Janet kept telling herself it was just the dank heat of the evening, all of them knew its real cause.
Somewhere in the house, Ted was drinking.
When dinner was finished and the dishes cleared and washed, Kim and Jared retreated to the second floor, pleading homework to be done and a few more boxes still to be unpacked. But when Jared lifted Molly into his arms-"Come on, small fry, if we have to work, so do you!"-Janet got the message loud and clear.
We don't want to deal with him.
After they left, Janet lingered in the kitchen. At first she told herself she simply wanted to be alone, wanted to put off dealing with her husband for as long as possible. But it was more than that.
Once again she was hearing her mother's voice, and this time it was saying something it had never said before: Leave him. Take the children, and leave him. He's a liar, he's a drunk, and whatever his problems are have nothing to do with you. Don't let him destroy you. Don't let him destroy the children. Get out now, before it's too late.
The words, so clear it was as if her mother were sitting at the kitchen table, shook Janet. Not because they were unfamiliar words.
She'd said them to herself a hundred times.
But always before, there had been qualifications.
And always before, fear had followed immediately on the heels of the thought. Fear of trying to raise the children alone. Fear of trying to put a roof over their heads, and food on the table, and clothes on their backs. But this evening, in the heavy heat of the Louisiana night, all the fears had fallen away.