Along Came Trouble(19)

He came back out and sat beside her.

“So what were you and Nana looking at?” Ellen asked.

“Primarily the album from her lecture tour in the Netherlands. Nineteen seventy-three, she said.”

“Is that the one with Bruno and all the mustaches and leather?”

“For an hour.”

Ellen smiled, but this time the smile was mostly for Nana, so she didn’t have to second-guess it. Carly’s grandmother had traveled the world as a feminist lecturer and professional consciousness-raiser in the late sixties and early seventies before moving to Camelot to take a faculty position at the college and make a home for her orphaned granddaughter. She looked like a sweet little old lady, but in fact she was as mouthy and lascivious as a frat boy, and about ten times as liberated.

“And then I spent the afternoon in the office giving myself a headache over a contract I had to sign and fax back to Breckenridge.”

“What’s wrong with it?”

“Nothing, it turns out. It just took me forever to understand it.”

“Not your forte, huh?”

“I’m no good with paperwork. Anyway, to top it off, tonight I had dinner with my whole family.”

“That’s bad?”

“That’s just Wednesday night. I love them, but they find a different way to drive me crazy every week.”

She fought back all the other questions she wanted to ask. How big was his family? Did he have brothers and sisters, nieces or nephews? A girlfriend?

Her curiosity had no shame. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d cared so much about the mundane details of someone else’s life. There was nowhere this intense wanting-to-know could lead that she had the freedom to follow.

“It sounds kind of nice,” she said. “To have all that family around.”

He laced his fingers behind his head, resting his elbows against the chair back. “It has its moments. Does that mean you don’t? Have family or somebody around, I mean?”

“Just Jamie, when he comes to visit. And my ex’s mom, I guess. She takes care of Henry a few days a week. She’s sort of family. Both of my parents are gone.”

“What about the ex, does he help out?”

“He’s an alcoholic.”

Caleb made a pained face, a standard response to her confession about Richard. He was probably thinking the standard thoughts and would soon offer one of the standard platitudes. What a shame. How hard for you.

It had been hard, but the alcohol had been the least of her problems when she was married to Richard.

One time, she’d embarrassed him at a dinner party by admitting she’d never read Ulysses. He’d had a few too many drinks, and he’d launched into a monologue that began with a few witty jokes at her expense and ended with a dissertation on her shortcomings. It went on so long that she’d fantasized about standing up and dumping her dinner in his lap. She’d imagined herself walking out, hiking half a mile home in the dark in her heels. Locking him out of the house until he sobered up.

She’d done nothing. Not that night, and not for days afterward. Finally, when it seemed possible it could be funny, she’d told Jamie.

Verbally abusive, Jamie had said. Never good enough for you. You should leave him.

But those were all Jamie’s words, and she hadn’t been able to absorb them, to believe them. Part of her had understood the logic behind her brother’s hatred for Richard, but she hadn’t known how to make it her own logic, her own hatred. Not until Henry came along.

In the divorce, she’d gotten the house and a custody agreement that allowed Richard three hours’ supervised visitation with Henry each week. Richard had gotten everything else. Ellen considered it a victory.

Caleb leaned forward, resting his elbows on his knees. Ellen waited for his sympathy, but it wasn’t what she got.

“No boyfriend?” he asked.

Surprised and grateful, she made a snorting sound of dismissal, the sort of accidental pig noise she was always embarrassing herself with. “No.”

Caleb rubbed his finger and thumb over his jaw, looking ponderous but with mischief in his eyes. “A girlfriend, then.”

“Come on, I’m not gay,” she protested. “Just, you know, divorced. A mom.”

“You say that like it’s the same thing as ‘washed up.’”

It is.

“Camelot’s a hard place to be thirty and single,” she pointed out. “All these college girls running around are tough on the ego.”