“The usual,” she answered absently.
“Well, what’s the usual?” asked Melinda.
“You know, Mom.”
Melinda smiled and pulled Penny’s cap down over her eyes.
“Mom, cut it out.”
“Boo-hoo,” said Melinda.
“Boo-hoo,” I said.
Penny bounced off the bench and took up her racquet. She studied us. She tapped her mother on the top of the head with the strings, then me. “You’re just sticking up for her, Terry.”
“I think she’s worth sticking up for,” I said.
“And it’s nice to be stuck up for, sometimes.”
“My boyfriend’s going to stick up only for me,” said Penny.
“No use hogging all the good feelings,” said Melinda. “There’s enough of those to go around.”
Penny let out that impatient exhale that kids save for the ignorant, then skipped onto the court.
“She sure has gotten to be a smart-ass the last year,” Mel said.
“Kinda has.”
“She’s competitive and jealous.”
“Maybe she’s going out of her way to make me feel welcome.”
Melinda shook her head. “I don’t think so. It’s not that I don’t think she’s generous enough for that. Or duplicitous enough to fake it to get what she wants. She genuinely adores you.”
I thought about that. Melinda ascribes levels of sophistication — as in sophistry — to Penny that I don’t see. I see a lack of guile. It’s another example of the difference in the way we see children in general, I suppose.
“Do you really think she’d BS me?”
“Oh, yes. I think it’s instinct for some people. Intuitive self-preservation. Smearing a little honey on things. She knows you like her, and that’s your weak spot. She’s not exploiting it yet, I don’t think.”
“You make her sound like a Borgia.”
“I think she has depths you don’t see. Well, do you feel welcome with us?”
I thought about that for a moment. The last year had been full of good things for me and full of disappointments, too. “Yes, most of the time. I don’t forget that you two are the family and I’m kind of the third wheel, but... third wheels are good sometimes. Like on ATVs and trikes and—”
“—No, really, do you feel welcome, or don’t you?”
“I have. You’ve never made me feel like an outsider. And Penny hasn’t, either. I think she likes me.”
Melinda turned her face to me and studied me hard. She had that interrogator’s expression, the placid one that bores in, gathers all and gives up nothing in return. “In fact, she’s playing us off against each other a lot more now than she used to. She’s using you to leverage her discontents with me.”
“I see that. But I wonder where to draw the line.”
“You shouldn’t cater to her, Terry.”
“Do you really think I do?”
“Of course you do. You’re a sucker for affection, just like we all are. I don’t blame you. I just don’t think it’s probably good for Penelope, in the long run, if you overdo that kind of thing.”
I felt gut punched. I hated even the idea of getting between her and her daughter. I wanted harmony, not conflict. Clear lines, no clutter. Who doesn’t? Few things in life are more surprising than assuming your partner agrees with you, only to find out she or he vehemently does not. You wonder where you’re getting your ideas of who they are.
“I really didn’t think I was. But I won’t. I’ll be real careful about that.”
“Do what you mink’s right, Terry. It’s just a phase. It will be over soon.”
Melinda turned away and watched the court. “But what I’m saying is, it’s a cheap-shit stunt to endear yourself to her if you’re not going to stick around.”
Wham.
She looked back at me with a cruel little smile. I’d seen a lot of that smile back around the time her father died and we were both in our separate worlds of torment Not so much, lately.
“I’ll always do what’s best for her, Terry. Always.”
“You should. And so far as my sticking around goes, I’m here. And I’m happy to be here. I adore both of you. You’re two of my favorite people in the whole world.”
She nodded, still looking back at me. The smile was gone. “So you don’t think that I’m just a dried-up old bag who won’t give you a family of your own?”
“Not going to answer, Mel. You know what the answer to that is.”
And well she did, because this line of inquiry had come up before. So far as being dried up, Melinda has always been squeamish and uncertain about her own sexuality. Not prudish so much as afraid, slightly ashamed. With me, anyway. I have no idea what she was like with Jordan Ishmael. “Dried up” was a phrase she introduced herself, though she has been quite a bit less than dried up on several occasions with me. She’s often called herself my “old girl.” It’s been a term of self-endearment, as well as a way of getting me to acknowledge that her two years of seniority don’t bother me in the least. They don’t and never have.
So far as not giving me a family, that’s a decision she made clear to me from the very moment we even considered moving closer to each other. Long before we decided to share a home. Marriage, maybe, she said: no children. She had been there and done that. I agreed wholeheartedly. I had had Matthew, and he was a perfect human and a perfect memory, and he was enough. I had no desire to bring another child into the world. None of them would ever be him. I believed that I had been blessed once and blessed almost completely. And I believed that only a fool would ask more of life than that.
Melinda has told me a hundred times — the first few in all seriousness, the others as a kind of tossed-off joke — that I’d be better off with a young bimbo who would have my babies and still look good in a two-piece five years from now. But the fact that Melinda is the absolute opposite of a bimbo is exactly what made me love her to begin with. I took to her unadorned qualities like a trout released into a cold mountain brook.
From the beginning there was no ditz or glitz in her; no mindless levity; no primping and preening; no consuming vanity, gyms, StairMasters or step aerobics; no low-calorie, nonfat, high-fiber diets; no weaves or perms or makeovers. In fact, until six months ago, she rarely wore makeup or did more with her hair than wash and comb it. Until six months ago I never saw her bring home clothes from anywhere but the discount warehouses. Until six months ago, when Mel began to pull out of that spiral that began with the death of her indifferent father, she rarely wore lipstick. Since that low point she’s shopped upscale two times and made regular attempts to prettify herself. She sometimes wears lipstick and makeup.
I’m not sure what to make of it or how to react to it. If it was a sign of happiness or newfound confidence, I’d be happy, too. But in spite of her noticeable improvement since those dark days, I wouldn’t describe Melinda Vickers — she reclaimed her maiden name when she divorced Jordan — as a happy person. There’s a sadness in her that I cherished from the start. A sadness that seemed like a perfect mate for my own. And it’s still there inside her, just beneath the new outfit from Nordstrom and the occasional lipstick and the neatly trimmed hair. But her sadness is the one thing about Melinda that I loved in the beginning and have become impatient with. I think it’s time for her to move beyond it. It’s not necessary. But who am I to say what her heart should feel?
I’ve been no help to her at all. I changed when I met Donna Mason. It actually seemed like something in the air I was breathing in that elevator, and maybe it did have to do with pheromones or some other biological mystery. I was instantly, subtly altered, my polarities tweaked, my point of view adjusted. I was lifted, turned and set down facing a slightly different direction. In that instant I saw myself with different eyes. I saw the world, and Melinda, too, with different eyes. It was like seeing clearly for the first time, or, more realistically, for the first time in a long time. Beginning then, with a four-floor elevator ride, I started to rethink a lot of what I thought I knew. That moment was a beginning and an ending. And since then I’ve been wondering how to accommodate the changed Terry Naughton with the old one. I’ve been as cautious as I can, as slow as I can, as self-examined as I can. I’ve put on the brakes, rationalized the circumstances, had a thousand long talks with myself. I’ve cursed the change, punished myself for undergoing it just when Melinda needed me most, loathed myself for stepping into that elevator, bludgeoned my own heart for its excitement. But after all of that, the fact remains, untarnished as a ball of solid gold: I am in love with Donna Mason and with the Terry Naughton I become when I think about her. I feel like many good things are possible with her, through her, around her. But I am dazed and suffocated by the Terry Naughton who lives his lying life with Melinda. I feel ready to shed away the old and make room for the new. Bottom line is I’ve made one gigantic mess of things, and I know this. There will be hell to pay.